Notes by Northwest

In current-day Seattle, Gino makes his money writing a phony astrology column and playing fortune teller for party entertainment. Sara, a fraud investigator, has visions of the future that always come true—and she’ll do anything to keep it a secret. Her clairvoyance has destroyed important relationships in her life.
When they meet, Gino hopes they can be more than friends. Unfortunately, the most Sara will commit to is cat-sitting for him while he goes sailing in Italy for his 25th birthday.
But when Gino disappears while swimming near the islands of the sirens off the Amalfi Coast, everyone presumes he has drowned—everyone except Sara, whose visions tell her he’s alive and in trouble. She just can’t tell where. Or when.
Can she find a way to help Gino without revealing her secret?
Gino washes up on a gravel beach, surrounded by men holding torches and daggers, dressed like extras from a pirate movie. Then he learns that it is 1348. The Black Death could kill him, a fiery fifteen-year-old girl is way too interested in him, and he finds himself the personal astrologer to Signore Ottavio—a man who had his last astrologer executed for being a charlatan.
Gino has never felt more like a charlatan in his life. How can he get back to the islands, the place where he fell through time, and back to his 21st century life?

This is the kind of book where you can smell and hear and see the fictional world the writer has created, so palpably does the atmosphere come through. Set on an island in the straits north of Puget Sound, in Washington, where everyone is either a fisherman or a berry farmer, the story is nominally about a murder trial. But since it's set in the 1950s, lingering memories of World War II, internment camps and racism helps fuel suspicion of a Japanese-American fisherman, a lifelong resident of the islands. It's a great story, but the primary pleasure of the book is Guterson's renderings of the people and the place.

From the NY Times review of this book.  Egan has become my favorite PNW author.

If you’re looking for something to believe in, you could do worse than Timothy Egan’s particular blend of intelligence and empathy. In his ninth book, “A Pilgrimage to Eternity,” this self-described “lapsed but listening” Irish Catholic makes the 1,200-mile journey from Canterbury to Rome along the Via Francigena “on foot, on two wheels, four wheels, or train — so long as I stay on the ground,” as he attempts to decide what he believes. If this book doesn’t quite settle the question of belief for you, it will at least fortify your faith in scrupulous reporting and captivating storytelling.