As the New Year frost creeps over an increasingly wintry landscape, the log fires will be lit and some of us will be looking forward to settling down with a good book. Among the millions of novels to choose from, book group member Heather Barron offers a selection of ten reads set in the countryside to transport you to another place or time 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Set on the island of Guernsey and written with warmth and humour as a series of letters between writer Juliet Ashton and a man she’s never met - a native of the island of Guernsey who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – a club set up on the spur of the moment when its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.

The Northern Echo:

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

A mix of country life and ghost story, the action takes place one late spring evening in 1912, in the crumbling country house, Sterne, where storm clouds gather as preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. A few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious - and not altogether savoury - survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor. The unexpected intrusion affects the family and their friends, bringing out their best and worst qualities, revealing long-buried secrets and unexpected depths of passion and rage.

The Way I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Fifteen-year-old Daisy’s mother died giving birth to her and her father has sent her from Manhattan to England to stay with her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Very quickly, this country idyll changes as bombs are dropped in London and it is occupied by an unknown enemy. The children must fend for themselves as power and systems fail, and the farm becomes more isolated. For a while it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, but the war is escalating and the children have to face challenges they never dreamed of.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Flora Poste, a recently orphaned and penniless modern urban socialite, goes to live with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm. Flora’s attempts to modernized the farm brings her into conflict with the family as she becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming. A wickedly funny and highly entertaining portrait of British rural life in the 1930s.

The Northern Echo:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. When an infected bolt of cloth brings plague from London, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

For those nostalgic for the 80s, even while coping with the challenging teenage years, will appreciate thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor’s dilemma. He is growing up in the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England in one eventful year - 1982. Jason is dealing with adolescence, a stammer, and girls, in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s recession. In thirteen chapters - each a short story in its own right – Mitchell creates an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A captivating novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood, and the old on the cusp of the new.

Village School by Miss Read

Miss Read, or in real life Dora Saint, is the headmistress of a small village school and this is the first of a number of books in which she charts the life of the residents in the fictitious villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. In this gentle story following a school year from the Christmas term through to Summer, Miss Read shares with us the ups and downs of the villagers and the children in her school. Not a modern novel – it was first published in 1955 – but containing the charm and nostalgia of by-gone days, when life was simpler.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Landed gentry lifestyle in the 19th century was perfectly captured in this classic novel of a family of adolescent daughters longing for the excitement and adventure that they know is waiting for them as soon as they can escape from the family home. We see the different directions that their lives take as they come into contact with new friends and scurrilous bounders, and the effect that misunderstandings and misconceptions have on their relationships with those they meet along the way.

A Month in the Country by JL Carr

Emerging deeply traumatised from action in the second world war, and a broken marriage, Tom Birkin finds contrast and peace in the slow pace of Yorkshire village life when he comes to restore a medieval mural in the local church in Oxgodby. As the day goes by and the mural slowly emerges, Tom is healed by the rural idyll and the people he meets in one hot summer. The novel records his memories of that time as he looks back, and offers an uplifting tale of hope and salvation in the midst of emotional wreckage.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

No list of books about country life would be complete without including this classic. The brutality of the Yorkshire Moors is the backdrop for the doomed love affair between our heroine Cathy and her volatile and violent cousin Heathcliff. Taking inspiration from her own surroundings, Emily weaves the wild landscape of the moors into the story – almost like a character in its own right. The savagery of the windswept and rugged terrain reflects the stormy relationship between Cathy and Heathcliffe as they inevitably fall in love with tragic consequences.