In R M Dashwood's glorious Provincial Daughter, this is life for a doctor's wife in a 1950s Berkshire village: feeding children, get them to school, making beds, interviewing boiler repairman, being depressed by scorn of next door neighbour, feeding toddler, a fleeting chance to wonder whether she ought to go to London for a decent hair cut, and then its back to collecting children, cooking, cleaning, scrambling into a dress that doesn't fit for a drinks party where everyone looks impossibly glamorous and expects her to be intellectual just because she has an English degree. More sherry please.

Ecclesiastical thrills in Barbara Pym's village drama, Some Tame Gazelle. All the fun of the village fete, and lots more fun in and out of Belinda Bede's house, where proposals keep happening, suppers are competitive, and curates are cossetted beyond all reasonable requirements. For those interested in the hierarchy of the Church of England as it applies to getting out of a job.

Come to Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire and trot around after the Rector's wife as she struggles with Northbridge in wartime conditions, in Northbridge Rectory. Shudder at the evacuees. Recoil at Mrs Spender's dinner-party conversation. Brace yoursef under Miss Pemberton's disapproval, but also marvel at her amazing cooking, and at the ease with which a book contract can be had with the right kind of onion soup. Mrs Villars only feels safe in the garden of the Rectory, but even there village life comes to find her. For all Barsetshire lovers.

E F Benson's camp classic Queen Lucia begins his series about the immortal Lucia, queen of art and tyrant of the muse, in her dear little village of Riseholme. Battle royal commences when Olga Bracely arrives in the village. She is far more talented, and a far better musician, than Lucia will ever know. Watch as Olga steals Georgie Pillson from Lucia's side. Gasp as the struggle for social dominance reaches epic proportions in an evening party of romps, and smile as the Wagnerian tableaux allow Olga to retire from the fray, leaving Lucia triumphantly, ignorantly, the victor. For students of Machiavelli.

Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, two books of short stories all about England's history, wrapped around Rudyard Kipling's village of Burwash in Sussex, and told in the master's signature style of multilevels, elliptical storytelling, and complex allusions. And what fine and fascinating stories they are, where the village is almost more important than the people. For readers who like their county history.

It's not a novel, but it's great political reportage and polemic. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell takes us into scenes of 20th-century degradation and poverty that were commonplace, and inescapable, for hundreds of thousands of the British before the Second World War. He gets angry about waste and mismanagement, petty meanness and middle-class squeamishness. He is resentful at the public-school system for giving him complexes about the smell of the poor, and he's furious at the misery children grow up in if their fathers can't get work. For readers who want something to get angry about.

Britain topples into the Second World War, and Barsetshire braces itself to deal with invaders: refugees, evacuees, foreigners, the lower-classes, and even socialists. Angela Thirkell's view of the war from the upper-class county perspective is a vision of the past as one part of it would have liked it to have been. She delights in caricature, satire, cutting down to size, and savage attacks on those who damage the glories of English civilisation. Pulling together, not shirking your turn in the communcal evacuees' canteen, being polite to the rude and being pleasant to the revolting are all part of the British Home Front at war. For readers who can do their own blackout and can cook rabbit stew.

This is a truly forgotten novel, and it's so charming! The American occupation forces in Okinawa attempt to enforce the American Way of Life on Japanese villagers, but two marooned geisha girls show everyone the real meaning of Japanese civilisation. Vern Sneider's The Tea-House of the August Moon was made into a 1956 film with Marlon Brando, but the book has the hidden depths of a mature saki or a porcelain tea cup. For readers who like to take their tea-breaks on tatami mats looking out onto a stream flowing through a grove of pine trees.

Greece in the 6th century BCE, where poets are honoured almost as much as athletes and horses. Mary Renault's The Praise-Singer is a terrific slice of history told through a famous poet's struggle to stay out of trouble and avoid the barbarians. But it's far more than one man's story; this is glorious historical reconstruction, and a very plausible set of ideas about how Pythagoras worked, how Homer got corrupted, and how red figure-ware vase painting was invented. Tyrants come and go: for readers who like their victory odes performed in linen.

Imagine the excitement when the first road is built through the village, when actors come to town, when Miss Girzy dies in a fire with the symbols of her greed clutched in either hand. This podcast raves about John Galt's classic Scottish novel about a village that grows into a town at the turn of the nineteenth century. Annals of the Parish is about instantly recognisable people set against rapidly changing provincial society. For readers who like a good saga.