In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to the
time-traveling future of 2060 -- the setting for several of her most
celebrated works -- and sent three Oxford historians to World War II
England: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle
of Dunkirk; Merope Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and
Polly Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. But
when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940, they struggle not
only to find their way home but to survive as Hitler's bombers attempt
to pummel London into submission. Now the situation has grown even more
dire. Small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that
one or all of them have somehow affected the past, changing the outcome
of the war. The belief that the past can be observed but never altered
has always been a core belief of time-travel theory -- but suddenly it
seems that the theory is horribly, tragically wrong. Meanwhile, in 2060
Oxford, the historians' supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and
seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses a powerful crush on Polly,
are engaged in a frantic and seemingly impossible struggle of their own
-- to find three missing needles in the haystack of history. Told with
compassion, humor, and an artistry both uplifting and devastating, All
Clear is more than just the triumphant culmination of the adventure that
began with Blackout. It's Connie Willis's most humane, heartfelt novel
yet -- a clear-eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary
acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by history.
