Blackout
In 2060, Oxford's historians travel routinely into the past, and the Second World War is the assignment everyone wants. Michael Davies is bound for Dover and the small boats of Dunkirk; Merope Ward is in Warwickshire under the name Eileen O'Reilly, minding evacuated children at a country manor; Polly Churchill takes a shopgirl's job on Oxford Street so that she can spend her nights in the Underground shelters and watch the Blitz from the inside. Each has been drilled in the rules: observe, do not intervene, and above all do not alter the course of events. What none of them expects is for the drops to close behind them. Cut off from 2060 with no retrieval team in sight and their deadlines slipping past, the three are thrown together in a London of falling bombs, blackout curtains and rubble-strewn mornings, where the only reliable information is what they carry in their own heads and their foreknowledge grows less trustworthy by the day.
Willis's portrait of wartime Britain is meticulous and warmly comic even as the danger mounts, and beneath it runs a colder question: whether the historians have already done something to the past that cannot be undone.
All Clear
The concluding half of the story begun in Blackout finds Michael, Merope and Polly still stranded in wartime London, hunting for a way home while the bombs keep falling. Their position is worsening. Polly is working towards a deadline she cannot bring herself to explain to the others, Michael is carrying an injury and a growing conviction that he has already interfered where he should not, and every discrepancy they notice between the war they studied and the war they are living in feeds the same dread. If historians can alter the past, then the Allied victory they have always treated as fixed may no longer be certain, and they may be the cause. In Oxford, meanwhile, others have begun to notice that three of their people have not come back.
Willis moves between the Blitz, the V-1 summer of 1944 and a handful of quieter corners of the war, drawing together threads laid down hundreds of pages earlier and giving her ordinary shopgirls, ambulance drivers and fire watchers their due. The result is a long, intricate and unashamedly emotional account of what heroism looks like when nobody involved can see the whole picture.
