I don’t believe there is any greater joy in the world than reading a book that makes you feel like you have stepped back in time. I love being swept up into the pages of a book that spills with authentic and imaginative vintage charm. The following books all depict different time periods, but they will always be my must-read texts when I want to escape to a world now gone by.

The sort-of-sequel to The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (a book pushed upon me perhaps ten years ago by my mum, urging me to read it), The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp is a warm, nostalgic period novel set in the 1960’s. I don’t remember much of The Lost Art, except for the fact that I enjoyed it in the way that you enjoy a hot cup of tea and a couple of digestive biscuits. It warmed you from the inside, and you felt as though you were experiencing the events first hand, wishing desperately that you lived in that time period and were friends with these fantastic characters. In the Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, Rice excels in her natural ability to set a scene both magically and realistically. The story starts in the rural West Country and follows Tara as she begins a singing career, moving to London, falling in love with a photographer, being shown off at Chelsea parties, even dancing on tables at the Marquee Club on the night of the Stones’ debut… Rice perfectly captures that feeling of being seventeen and having the whole world on your doorstep. She has a real gift for evoking a nostalgia-tinged rural childhood, the quaintness of the first and last county in England in the fifties, and the excitement and pure rock-n-roll lifestyle of London in the swinging sixties.

This book is so spectacularly vivid and deliciously detailed. Romance laces every word in a way that makes your heart skip a beat, and the imagery just makes you want to run straight off to Paris, visit a Patisserie and eat every single beautiful creation described. The Confectioner’s Tale tells a love story of two kinds. Set at the famous Patisserie Clermont in Paris, 1909, but told eighty years later through the eyes of Padra Stevenson, researching a photograph she found of her grandfather, the words ‘Forgive me’ written on the back. Her discovery leads her to reveal a mysterious, bittersweet and evocative story about two star-crossed lovers. The writing is what makes this book so infinitely special. It is mouth-watering, literally. The romance of the Parisian setting makes your heart burst.

The Miniaturist is set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, and tells the story of eighteen year old Nella Oortman who, after an arranged marriage to an illustrious and mysterious merchant trader, comes to the bustling city to begin a new life. Her loneliness and desolation is what struck me hardest, as she is left in the home with her husband’s cold and enigmatic sister. Her life changes when her husband arrives home with a gift – a beautiful cabinet dolls house. She is offended, seeing it as a toy for a child, but resentfully orders custom-made pieces to fill it. Amongst the objects that arrive from the elusive Miniaturist are items such as a tiny scrap of marzipan that makes people sick to the soul, and the miniature betrothal cup that was missing from her wedding. More things begin to arrive for the cabinet house, eerily life-like, and ominously attuned to the things that happen under her roof. This story is all at once horrible, and lonely, but beautiful too. Perfectly polished and mysteriously compelling, The Miniaturist is definitely a tale that takes you out of your own era and right into the heart of a city of hidden opulence and devastating secrets…