Voyager

Voyager is the third novel in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, published in 1994 and following Dragonfly in Amber. It takes up Claire Randall's life on the far side of her story: she is in Scotland in the 1960s, married and working as a doctor, having come back through the stones from the eighteenth century twenty years earlier in her own time.

The engine of the book is a search. Claire and the historian Roger Wakefield trace records that might show what became of Jamie Fraser after the battle of Culloden, and when those records suggest he survived, she is faced with the possibility of going back to find him. The second half of the novel crosses the Atlantic to the Caribbean and to a different set of dangers.

Gabaldon writes the series by mixing historical research with the machinery of time travel, and Voyager is the volume where the balancing act is most visible: a long book carrying a spy plot, a sea crossing and the question of what a person owes to events she already knows the end of.