alternate history

In the dizzying third (and probably not the last) installment of a steampunk/alternative-universe/time-travel saga, polymath explorer extraordinaire Sir Richard Burton returns with his trusty sidekick poet Algernon Swinburne to pre-empt a royal assassination, prevent world war, recover a set of psychoactive diamonds deposited by a now-extinct non-human race of super beings, and defeat the powers of evil. Burton hops between alternative realities in an enthralling tale replete with an encyclopedic grasp of period detail. Thoroughly engrossing.

Continuing and expanding on the adventure, steampunkery and general Victorian madness of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack Hodder’s protagonists Sir Francis Burton and his assistant poet Algernon Swinburne deal with catastrophic threats to "life as we know it". A seemingly routine robbery leads to a dubious claim on an aristocrat’s estate and quickly morphs into wraith-induced rioting in the streets of London.

A high school English teacher is sent back to 1958 via a time travel rabbit hole located in a Maine diner. His objective is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, but he must first make sure of Oswald’s guilt and that he acted alone. An incredibly entertaining novel, 11/22/63 asks what might have happened had President Kennedy lived. Check Our Catalog



Connie Willis adds a seventh Hugo Award to her list of accomplishments with this diptych. Continuing a theme developed in The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, Willis imagines a near future (2060) in which Oxford University historians conduct field work by traveling into the past. The past in these two books (which are actually one story) is London during WWII.