Books with a sense of time and place

[jerrywesterby]

I love books where I can get completely immersed in a different place or time in history, don't mind when or where as long as it's somewhere new to discover!

I like crime genre so some of my recent favourites have been Jane Harper, set in the Australian outback and one I can't remember the author but set in East Berlin in the 1980s

Please give me your favourites I need some inspiration!

Hamnet is brilliant. I’d also recommend Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell - it’s set in London in the 1976 heatwave.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg is very good, and very evocative - set mainly in Greenland.

Thanks everyone some very interesting recommendations I'll have an enjoyable evening researching these!

A stunning book. I remember the master gardener and how the pond was laid out.so ingeniouly that the sky seemed part of the garden and the slow flap of the heron's wings overhead. The natural world is a refuge from the cruel horrors of wartime and so beautifully described that it is haunting.

The Shardlake series by C J Sansom.
A lawyer in Henry VIII times investigates various crimes. I thought these had a memorable sense of place and time. I don't usually read historical fiction - these got me really interested in the time period.
The first one is set around the dissolution of the monasteries. Later ones move to London and York.
www.amazon.co.uk/Dissolution-Shardlake-C-J-Sansom/dp/1447285832/ref=monarch_sidesheet

Restoration by Rose Tremain, set in the reign of Charles II.

I loved the Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina dai randel. Really conjures up place and era.

Another vote for the Shardlake series .

I also loved Memoirs of A Geisha ( set in Japan before and during WW 2 ) and The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh , a historical novel featuring Burma, Malaya and India.

Atonement

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (rural Alaska.... 1800s from memory)

Still Life by Sarah Winman, a real saga spanning much of 20th Century in London and Florence.

Kate Atkinson's latest, Shrines of Gaiety is terrific. Also Sarah Waters, The Night Watch.

I was coming on to suggest this.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray is very evocative of Glasgow.
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - Oxford
Dracula by Bram Stoker - Whitby