The Outcasts of Time

 Fiction by Ian Mortimer

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This story begins in December 1348 when two men are traveling through a Britain ravaged by the Black Death. John, a serious young man with a wife and children waiting at home, is devastated by all the senseless death and suffering, and longs to find a way to help his fellow men. His brother William, normally more light-hearted and pleasure-loving, takes a more practical view of the situation, and tries to ignore their surroundings and focus on getting home. Then something happens, and both brothers realize that they have caught the plague themselves.

The next part of the story involves a strange Brigadoon-like time-travel element that is difficult to understand and never fully explained by the author. Basically the young men realize that they have less than a week to live and are given a strange choice: to live out their last few days normally, or to live each day they have left 99 years apart.

(Wait, what? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me either. You just have to roll with it.)

The rest of the book is interesting philosophically, but pretty weird from a story-line perspective. We get John's (and some of William's) point of view on a single day in each of the following years: 1447, 1546, 1645, 1744, 1843, and finally 1942. It makes the reader think a bit about what the progress of humanity means, if people are really better off now than they were in the past, can we know the purpose of life in general, and so on.

All in all, this was a good book but not really a good story, if that makes sense.