Village Life in the Dordogne (Middlebury College Alumni)
Explore village life in the Dordogne through a curated Middlebury College alumni reading list. Discover historical fiction and medieval tales from Michael Crichton, Umberto Eco, and Connie Willis.
Book
Down the Common
by Ann Baer
Everyday life in medieval England seen through the eyes of Marion, the wife of a carpenter. The novel follows her daily grind, living in a dirty one-room hut, giving birth to children who die, lugging water, battling rats and using a pool for a mirror. A first novel.
Book
Timeline
by Michael Crichton
When a group of scientists learns how to travel through time, they enter life in fourteenth-century feudal France and threaten the history of the world.
Book
Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis
Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. âA tour de force.ââThe New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanityâs history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrinâbarely of age herselfâfinds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of historyâs darkest hours.
Book
The Plague Tales
by Ann Benson
âPart historical novel, part futuristic adventure . . . chock full of curious lore and considerable suspense.ââEntertainment Weekly It is history's most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacteriumâthe invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague. In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death. . . . Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries. From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction. For in 2005, humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past. Praise for The Plague Tales âBenson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller.ââPublishers Weekly (starred review) âHarrowing . . . Will give readers both nightmares and thrills . . . A carefully woven page-turner from which . . . Robin Cook and Michael Crichton could learn.ââLibrary Journal âA hard-to-put-down thriller steeped in historical fiction and bio-tech sci-fi.ââMiddlesex News (Mass.)
Book
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
