Great-Aunt Ada once saw something nasty in the woodshed, and has held her family trapped in Cold Comfort Farm ever since. And now Flora Poste comes to rescue them, with common sense, a belief in Vogue, and the certainty that messy living needs to be tidied up. Stella Gibbons' immortal satire mocks pretentiousness, and reassures the meek that they will inherit the farm. For melodramatists everywhere.

Extraordinary though it might seem, a pompous, arrogant, opinionated and stuffy Prussian military man, in a wet and windy English summer, five years before the First World War, makes the funniest caravan holiday ever, in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Caravaners. His wife is delightful, their fellow travellers are patient, even the horses are well-behaved, and Baron Otto von Ottring is a magnificent comic creation for us all to stand back and admire, and avoid. For those who had caravan holidays in their youth which have strangely never recurred.

Just like her name, Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson is a classic of British bathos, sending up the pompousness of Oxford University with a feminine attack on its Edwardian male bastions. For those who wear pearls for pleasure.

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.

Imagine a planet where men simply die, they can't live there, and so its society is composed entirely of women. They have children, they trade, they try and kill each other, they're surviving. What happens when a Company ship lands security staff and militarised colonists to try and take over this agricultural world barely out of the Iron Age? Nicola Griffith's Ammonite: for readers who take their anthropology seriously.

Deep in space, women and men are equal. Elizabeth Moon's Once A Hero isn't about women and men at all, but about soldiers and treachery, leadership and command, truth and lies. Esmay Suiza rides horses reluctantly because she'd much rather be safe in space, where she belongs. For readers who just want a great space navy novel that happens to be saturated in feminism.