The best alternative alternate history novels

Although it starts with a teasing prologue in which the main character, Ursula, prepares to shoot Hitler in a Munich coffee shop in 1930, this novel then goes back to Ursula's birth, or rather her stillbirth, on a snowy night when the midwife fails to reach her mother in time. The narrative continues through a series of dark moments and silly accidents of the kind that most children survive, but some don't. Yet Ursula does both: life after life, in other words. This might sound experimental and complicated, but in Atkinson's hands, it becomes a deeply involving saga of life, love, and war in the first half of the last century told with a brilliantly alternate twist.

Moorcock might be best known for his sword-and-sorcery Elric novels, but he's also a writer of considerable daring and style. Gloriana tells of a Queen of Albion whose empire stretches from the great continent of Virginia to far Hindustan, and then on to Cathay beyond. Half-familiar figures and place names vie with pagan myths and strange ceremonies inside a palace so vast and rambling that every kind of wonder, and the darkest of secrets, have room to hide. The settings and the language are glorious, and the characters, and their schemes and machinations, come vibrantly alive. This is a vivid dream of an alternate queen and an alternate England.

No question at all that this novel is set in an alternate dystopia. It's Britain in the 1990s, but the cloning of humans is not only possible but legal, and these clones are then compelled to gradually give up their organs so normal citizens can extend their lives. If that sounds pretty grim, in many ways it is, but somehow in this novel it isn't, as the quiet voice of Ishiguro's narrator, a clone called Kathy who is now a carer for other donors as their health declines, makes it all feel eerily normal. This book eschews the usual dystopian bombast in favour of telling how a dark and strange but compellingly plausible situation affects people's lives.

We all have our own private "what if" moments and personal alternate histories. The party invites we wisely declined, the job offer we foolishly accepted, and—above all, I suspect for many of us—the person we did or didn't kiss. Irina, a successful book illustrator in a long-term relationship with a caring if somewhat boring Lawrence, faces such a crossroads when she encounters the laddish but glamorous professional snooker player Ramsey. Which way does she go? The answer, through the book's following alternate chapters, is both. We get to examine the trails, tribulations, and excitements that run through these alternate relationships through the scalpel of Shriver's characteristically sharp but always witty narrative.

Pretty much every historical novel is an alternate history, at least in the sense that it puts semi made-up scenes and characters into otherwise realistic events and settings, but Possession takes the "made-up" bit to another level. Two modern researchers are looking into a previously unknown love affair between the famous Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. All of which, of course, is fiction. But what boots this novel into the alternate stratosphere is the way Byatt interweaves and develops her story through the writings of these great alternate Victorian poets. There are love letters, poems, journal entries, short stories, all executed with great skill and heartfelt conviction.