Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians
are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American
Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is
prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of
bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr.
Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill's next
assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London's Blitz. And
seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is
determined to go to the Crusades so that he can "catch up" to her in
age.
But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no
apparent reason and switching around everyone's schedules. And when
Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get
worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs,
dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most
incorrigible children in all of history--to say nothing of a growing
feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself
are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable
mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our
heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no
historian can possibly change the past.
From the people sheltering in the tube stations of London to the retired
sailors who set off across the Channel to rescue the stranded British
Army from Dunkirk, from shopgirls to ambulance drivers, from spies to
hospital nurses to Shakespearean actors, Blackout reveals a side of
World War II seldom seen before: a dangerous, desperate world in which
there are no civilians and in which everybody--from the Queen down to
the lowliest barmaid--is determined to do their bit to help a
beleaguered nation survive.
