With a detective’s forensic patience and the narrative ear of a novelist, Tindall unpicks the histories of these houses

Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history – woven from close research into people and places – that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue. In this unique and often joyful chronicle, she interweaves the stories of three houses which marked crucial stages in her own life

A gentle, yet rigorous examination of the story of three historic buildings...each chapter is an engaging meditation on English history. Thanks to Ms Tindall the stories of all three are better understood than at any point in their history, and all have their place in a perfectly crafted book

Tindall is a forensic researcher [and] has an imaginative historical sensibility and her way of revisiting the past – as if approaching it through the back door – has both subtlety and poignancy. The names of Tindall’s inhabitants may sometimes pass in a blur but together they form a roll-call of the predecessors of modern Britain. There are of course thousands of other houses like the three in this touching book...whose stories will never be told

Gillian Tindall is gifted with an archeological imagination. [She] circles around these houses, bringing out their light, colour and preciousness by employing a method that crosses genres. This book is an education in many things

A triumph over time and death, proof that the past is all around us

Her excavation of the histories of the ordinary people who lived in each place is fascinating and she vividly brings the past to life via domestic minutiae

Subtle, delicate and slightly dotty. Tindall is attracted to the idea of lives overlooked and deeds mislaid…this intriguing, imaginative book is very much my cup of tea

Three houses - a Cotswold vicarage, a one-time girls' boarding school and a Jacobean house. Gillian Tindall explores the lives of those who once lived there, and through her research she is able to reveal four centuries of English history. Tindall has sensitivity to the past like few others; her approach to history is delicate, detailed and revealing. For my money, this is one of the history leads of the year

The big surprise of this book is the fascinating thread of memories which holds the narrative together

She is a writer with a quiet genius for local history and empathetic understanding of ordinary people

A deeply rewarding read

Both warm and poignant and a joy to read

It’s a worthy project, but in the most fascinating way

Tindall transforms bricks and mortar into fascinating social history

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.