Blackout - Connie Willis

With her trademark understated, eloquent style, Willis expands the conceit of her Hugo and Nebula winning 1982 story Fire Watch into a page-turning thriller, her first novel since 2001's Passage. Three young historians travel from 2060 to early 1940s Britain for firsthand research. As Eileen handles a measles outbreak during the children's evacuation and Polly struggles to work as a London shopgirl, hints of trouble with the time-travel equipment barely register on their radar. Historians aren't supposed to be able to change the course of history, but Mike's actions at Dunkirk may disrupt both the past and the future. 

Locating Privacy in Tudor London asks new questions about where private life was lived in the early modern period, about where evidence of it has been preserved, and about how progressive and coherent its history can be said to have been. The Renaissance and the Reformation are generally taken to have produced significant advances in individuality, subjectivity, and interiority, especially among the elite, but this study of middling-sort culture shows privacy to have been an object of suspicion, of competing priorities, and of compulsory betrayals.

Tiger in the Smoke

From the opening scene in a London 'pea-souper', the descriptive powers of this writer suck you into the strange and captivating thriller. Set in post-WWII London, each of the characters is wonderfully and mesmorisingly described, with effective cameos, such as the first meeting between the police inspector Luke and the old Canon Avril.

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More Work for the Undertaker by Margery AllinghamMore Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham

The story takes place in Apron St., 'a strange decayed sort of neighbourhood', Dickensian London-at once entertaining and disquieting. Due to Allingham's unique gift for making place as vivid as character, the atmosphere is one of frozen in time, unchanged since the Victorian era. London is described as a series of villages in which the Palinodes act as squires. The characters are, as usual, quite wonderful, and the villains are true 'Margery Allingham evil.' Nobody does this quite like her.

'48

Mad Max meets dystopian London bloodsuckers three years after the Allies lose WW II, in a what-if tale by the author of (among 18 others) the much richer, or at least completely different, Portent (1996). Hitler hits London with his V1 rockets but still finds himself losing the war. So he fires off V2 rockets, which hold a deadly virus that freezes human blood and causes fast death, although some rare victims die more slowly.