A fascinating list and real food for thought. I would add The Offing by Benjamin Myers. Set just after WWII it is one of the gentlest and evocative books I have read in a long time. It is a boy meets girl book - but the boy is 13 and the 'girl' is well into her fifties. Both have lessons to teach the other.

The there is Restitution Road by Antonin Varenne conjures up palpable images of cholera in London, before taking the reader across the Atlantic to the emerging United States.

Couldn't put either of them down.