Outlander

Claire Randall, a former combat nurse on a 1945 honeymoon in Inverness with her husband Frank, touches a standing stone at the Craigh na Dun circle and wakes in 1743, in the same landscape two centuries earlier, caught almost immediately between Redcoat patrols and Highland clansmen of Clan MacKenzie. Suspected of espionage on both sides, she is married off, ostensibly for her own protection and to keep her from being handed over to the sadistic English officer Jonathan Randall, who resembles her twentieth century husband exactly, to a young clansman named Jamie Fraser. What begins as a legal fiction becomes a real marriage, and Claire, torn between her old life and a Scotland already sliding toward the Jacobite rising, chooses to stay. The novel's most harrowing sequence has Randall capture and torture Jamie at Wentworth Prison, and Claire and a party of Highlanders, driving a herd of cattle through the prison's underground halls, mount a rescue that leaves Jamie alive but permanently marked by the experience. The book ends with the couple fleeing to a French abbey after further danger, Claire revealing she is pregnant, the eighteenth century and the war coming to it now unambiguously her own story rather than a place she is only visiting.

Reading it means watching a time travel premise give way almost immediately to a long, detailed historical romance, eight hundred fifty pages mixing real Jacobite era research with frank, sustained sexuality and violence, including the Wentworth Prison chapter some readers find the novel's most powerful writing and others find the hardest to get through.