Books set in England

Children sail a dinghy, camp on an island and wage a pirate war on a Lakeland lake.

The poet’s guide to the lakes and fells he lived among, and how to see them.

1952: Ruby is born above a pet shop in York, and tells four generations of her family.

1760s: coin clippers rule the moors above the Calder Valley, until the law comes.

1937: a young vet arrives in the Yorkshire Dales to treat farmers’ cows and tempers.

An orphan from India, a manor on the moor, and a locked garden coming back to life.

A London clerk goes to a castle above the Borgo Pass, and the count follows him to Whitby.

The West Riding in 1811–12: mill owners, Luddite machine-breakers and two young women.

1770s: love and revenge between two houses on the Yorkshire moors.

Leeds then and now: a retired policewoman buys a child, and a 1975 murder resurfaces.

Leeds in the Ripper years: women murdered in Chapeltown, and police as bad as the killer.

1974: a young crime reporter in Leeds follows a missing girl into a rotten West Yorkshire.

An adopted girl raised for the mission field in a Pentecostal household in Accrington.

Orwell goes north to the miners’ towns: lodging houses, the coalface, life on the dole.

A southern parson’s daughter in smoky Milton, Gaskell’s Manchester, and a strike.

A weaver’s daughter, a mill owner’s son and a murder, in the cellars of the poor.

A mill owner’s son of twenty-four walks the slums of Manchester and writes what he sees.

A lady and her gamekeeper in the last woods of an estate among the Midlands coal pits.

Three generations of the Brangwens on a farm by the Erewash, as the collieries close in.

A miner’s son grows up in a Nottinghamshire pit village, held between mother and lovers.

A Suffolk farmer and his son through one hard winter, a death in Zambia between them.

A walk down the Suffolk coast in August, from Lowestoft to drowned Dunwich.

A history teacher tells his class the Fens instead: eels, locks, beer and a drowned boy.

The hot summer of 1900: a boy carries letters across a Norfolk estate, and is undone.

A body in the wrong grave, a church’s eight bells, and the Fens under flood.

A Cambridge private detective takes on three old cases of loss and murder.

A reforming master takes on the dons and the porter of a gluttonous Cambridge college.

A young detective looks into a student’s death in Cambridge, among colleges and punts.

A girl’s first years at a women’s college in Cambridge, and the neighbours she loved.

A village childhood in a Cotswold valley after the Great War, before the cars came.

A flood on the Thames: an innkeeper’s boy carries a baby downstream by canoe.

A dinner party in Istanbul, and the Oxford friendships that broke her years before.

1663: a don is poisoned in Restoration Oxford, and four witnesses tell four stories.

Lyra runs wild over the roofs of Jordan College, in an Oxford of daemons.

A Spanish lecturer’s two years among Oxford’s dons, its bookshops and a secret affair.

Morse in Jericho, Oxford’s canal-side streets, where a woman he liked is found hanged.

Inspector Morse’s first case: a hitchhiker found dead in a pub yard north of Oxford.

1920s: Charles falls for Sebastian, his teddy bear and his family at Oxford.

A women’s college in Oxford, poison-pen letters, and Harriet Vane back among the dons.

A stonemason dreams of the colleges of Christminster, Hardy’s Oxford, and stays outside.

Three friends and a dog row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, and nothing goes right.

A celebrity art historian’s fall exposes London from its oligarchs to its streets.

1915: Céline’s lost novel, among pimps and deserters in London’s underworld.

1974: a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot meet secretly in a Nicosia tavern.

Twelve Black British women, most of them Londoners, across a century of lives.

A model falls from a Mayfair balcony, and a one-legged detective takes the case.

Four Londoners try to leave the north-west London estate where they grew up.

1950: a London painter of glass is told her destiny waits in Istanbul.

A blacksmith’s son from Putney rises to run Henry VIII’s England from Austin Friars.

Two French fathers share a house in South Kensington, the little France of London.

A London surgeon’s Saturday collides with the march against the Iraq war.

1983: a young man lodges with a Tory MP’s family in Notting Hill, in the Thatcher years.

A young Bangladeshi bride builds a life in a tower block off Brick Lane.

1975–1999: two wartime friends and their families in multicultural north London.

Two thousand years of London told by theme: fog, fire, crowds, crime, the river.

A Clerkenwell house left to a researcher, and the Elizabethan magus who lived there.

A boy from Bromley, his father turned suburban guru, and the road into 1970s London.

A woman foresees her own murder in a Portobello pub, and chooses her killer.

Murders at Hawksmoor’s East End churches, in his century and ours at once.

Kensington, 1945: a hostel for young ladies between VE Day and VJ Day, and a buried bomb.

A broke translator drifts through Soho pubs, film sets and a midnight swim in the Thames.

Wartime London around Clapham Common: an affair, a flying bomb, and a vow made to God.

A poet at war with money sells books in a Hampstead shop and rents a cold bedsit.

Orwell washes dishes in Paris hotel kitchens, then tramps across London.

One June day, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London to buy flowers for her party.

A clubfooted orphan from a Kent vicarage tries art in Paris, then medicine in London.

1886: an anarchist plot to bomb Greenwich goes wrong in the fogs of London.

A City clerk records the small humiliations of life at The Laurels, Holloway.

A beautiful young man stays young in London while his portrait ages.

Holmes and Watson from Baker Street to a steam-launch chase down the Thames.

Holmes and Watson meet in London and solve their first case together.

A respectable doctor, a door in a back street, and the man who comes out of it at night.

A body fished from the Thames, a dust-heap fortune, and a city living on its rubbish.

1775–1793: between a London bank and the Paris of the guillotine.

Fog on the Thames, mud in the streets, and a lawsuit that outlives everyone in it.

Christmas Eve in the City: a miser, three ghosts, and the Cratchits’ dinner in Camden.

1780: the Gordon riots burn Newgate, and a simple boy with a raven is swept along.

An orphan falls in with Fagin’s gang of boy thieves in London.

1660–1669: the plague, the Great Fire and a navy clerk’s days, in his own shorthand.

1665: a saddler stays in the City and walks its streets as the plague carts pass.

1787: a merchant’s new wife on the quay, and the Africans he brings home to sell.

Eight years on, Anne Elliot meets the man she refused again, in Bath’s drawing rooms.

A girl raised on Gothic novels comes to Bath for the season: balls, Pump Room, suitors.

A grumpy squire’s family tours Britain in letters: Bath’s waters, London, Edinburgh.

December 1170: Thomas Becket comes home to Canterbury knowing the knights will follow.

A boy’s road from the Yarmouth sands to Canterbury, Dover and a London of clerks.

Four men drive a butcher’s ashes from a Bermondsey pub to the end of Margate pier.

A garden in the shingle at Dungeness, under the power station, kept as he fell ill.

A blacksmith’s boy meets a convict on the Kent marshes, then goes to London a gentleman.

Five thousand years ago on the chalk plain, a flint miner dreams of a ring of stones.

A preacher elected mayor stages a Passion play, and the Grail troubles the whole town.

A foundling turned out of a Somerset manor takes the road to London and its temptations.

A band of rabbits flees its doomed warren for the high downs south of Newbury.

A curate’s letters on the swallows, tortoise and beech hangers of one Hampshire parish.

Peace in 1945, and the Cazalet marriages and households coming apart.

The Cazalets from 1942 to the war’s end, between the Sussex house and London.

The Cazalets at Home Place through the first years of the war, seen by the girls.

1937–1938: three brothers bring their families from London to the house in Sussex.

A London orphan tidies up her doomed cousins on a Sussex farm: the rural novel mocked.

House painters in Mugsborough, which is Hastings, argue over why the poor stay poor.

Summer 1959 on Brighton pier: a magician, his assistant and the compère, before it ends.

A stag-night prank goes wrong, and Detective Roy Grace looks for a groom buried alive.

A teenage gang leader, a murder and a waitress who knows too much on Brighton’s seafront.

Weymouth out of season: the esplanade, Portland’s quarries, and a town of solitaries.

A village girl is undone by two men, across the dairies and chalk downs of Wessex.

Dorchester as Casterbridge: a hay-trusser sells his wife at a fair and rises to mayor.

Egdon Heath, Dorset’s dark heathland, and those who long to leave it or come back.

A headstrong young farmer and her three suitors, through the seasons of rural Wessex.

1810s: Mary Anning and a London spinster hunt fossils on the beaches of Lyme Regis.

1867: a gentleman fossil hunter and an outcast woman on the Cobb at Lyme Regis.

A hotel on a tidal island off the Devon coast, and an actress strangled in a cove.

An otter’s life and death along the Taw and the Torridge, from the moor to the sea.

A family curse, an escaped convict and a great black dog on the Dartmoor mires.

1670s: a farmer’s son loves a girl from the outlaw clan in the hidden valley on Exmoor.

Under sail from Galicia to Scotland, looking for the fairies of the Celtic capes.

On foot from the Tamar to Land’s End, sifting Cornwall’s myths from its history.

1972: three keepers vanish from a lighthouse off Land’s End, leaving three wives.

Homeless and ill, a couple walk the South West Coast Path around Cornwall.

A cliff-top farm on the north Cornish coast, and a wartime summer it has never got over.

A Cornish estate, its young heir, and a cousin’s widow from Florence he cannot read.

1783: a soldier comes home from America to a ruined estate and Cornwall’s copper mines.

Restoration Cornwall: a London lady, a French pirate, a hidden creek on the Helford.

A shy young bride at Manderley, a Cornish house haunted by the first wife.

1820: an orphan comes to her uncle’s inn on Bodmin Moor, a den of wreckers.