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.