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Books like Doomsday Book

Connie Willis · 1992 · US · science fiction
Book 1 of 4 in Oxford Time Travel
★ 4.03 Goodreads · 67,276 ratings

Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2054, is sent back to an English village in 1320, just as an epidemic breaks out in the Oxford of her own time.

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12 books for readers of Doomsday Book

Timescape

Gregory Benford · 1980 · US 94% match ★ 3.73 Goodreads · 11,784 ratings
shares: academic, time travel, dual timeline · unhurried, earnest

In 1998, with the world dying of ecological collapse, Cambridge scientists try to warn the past using tachyons, and in 1962 a young physicist in California picks up the strange noise in his experiment and tries to make sense of it.

The House on the Strand

Daphne du Maurier · 1969 · UK 92% match ★ 3.82 Goodreads · 15,735 ratings
shares: time travel, medieval · earnest, unhurried

A man tries a hallucinogenic drug that sends his consciousness into 14th-century Cornwall, where obsession slowly overwrites his real life.

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel · 2022 · Canada 91% match ★ 4.04 Goodreads · 318,610 ratings
shares: time travel, epidemic · easy read, earnest

A glitch in time links an exiled Englishman in a 1912 British Columbia forest to a moon-colony novelist on a pandemic book tour, and an investigator from the future goes back to learn whether reality is a simulation.

Darwin's Radio

Greg Bear · 1999 · US 87% match ★ 3.73 Goodreads · 17,027 ratings
shares: scifi, epidemic, nebula award · earnest, speculative

A mass grave in Georgia, a frozen Neanderthal family in the Alps and a new virus that causes miscarriages all point to the next step in human evolution.

Timeline

Michael Crichton · 1999 · US 87% match ★ 3.63 Hardcover · 608 ratings
shares: time travel, academic, medieval · earnest, suspenseful

When the head of an archaeological dig in the Dordogne vanishes, his graduate students learn that a technology company has been sending people to fourteenth-century France, and are sent back to bring him home.

The End of Eternity

Isaac Asimov · 1955 · US 87% match ★ 4.24 Goodreads · 65,327 ratings
shares: time travel · speculative, easy read

A technician in a time-altering organisation makes unauthorised changes to history to save a woman he loves, threatening the existence of eternity itself.

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler · 1979 · US 86% match ★ 4.31 Goodreads · 297,528 ratings
shares: time travel, harrowing · easy read, wrenching

A modern Black woman is repeatedly pulled back in time to the antebellum South, where she must save the life of her white ancestor to ensure her own existence.

The Children of Men

P. D. James · 1992 · UK 86% match ★ 3.66 Goodreads · 54,245 ratings
shares: easy read, dark

In a near-future England where humanity has become infertile, a disillusioned historian is drawn into a resistance movement against a totalitarian government.

The Dog Stars

Peter Heller · 2012 · US 86% match ★ 3.92 Goodreads · 92,823 ratings
shares: epidemic, grief · wrenching, earnest

A pilot survives a pandemic that kills most of humanity and learns to live in the beautiful, dangerous emptiness of Colorado.

Cinder

Marissa Meyer · 2012 · US 86% match ★ 4.12 Goodreads · 1,038,926 ratings
Book 1 of 4 in The Lunar Chronicles
shares: scifi, epidemic · easy read, earnest

Cinder, a cyborg mechanic in New Beijing, works under her stepmother's rule while a deadly plague spreads, and a visit from Prince Kai to her market stall pulls her into a conflict with the moon's ruthless queen.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers · 2011 · UK 86% match ★ 3.10 Goodreads · 1,983 ratings
shares: epidemic · wrenching, easy read

A virus released by terrorists means every pregnant woman in the world now dies, and Jessie Lamb, sixteen, writes her account from the room where her father has locked her up to stop what she has decided to do.

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow · 2025 · US 86% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 91,910 ratings
shares: time travel, academic, medieval · wrenching, speculative

A failed soldier turned historian in the kingdom of Dominion becomes obsessed with Sir Una Everlasting, the orphan knight who died for her queen centuries ago, and the obsession pulls him into her story, which keeps repeating.