Michael Crichton's new novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. Any moment of the past can be actualized -- and a group of historians can enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century feudal France.

Michael Crichton is the author of The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, The Terminal Man, The Lost World, Airframe and Timeline. He is the winner of an Edgar Award (1980; The Great Train Robbery) as well as an Emmy, a Peabody, and a Writer's Guild of America Award for the television series ER.