Where's your reading taking you?

    For the last few days I've been on a farm on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie in the present day thanks to Jane Urquhart's fine novel Sanctuary Line (from which there's a short extract here). Now I'm across the lake in Ohio and I've gone back in time to the 1850s. I'm with Honor Bright, a young Quaker woman from Dorset who has travelled to America in the company of her sister who is to be married to Adam Cox, a draper who emigrated a few years earlier.

    Honor is the heroine of Tracy Chevalier's new novel The Last Runaway. She's an expert seamstress and quilter, and en route to her new home fate has brought her to the household of Belle Mills, a milliner, so in return for board and lodging for a few days, Honor is plying her needle making and decorating hats and bonnets for the ladies of the town of Wellington - headgear far more elaborate than she herself would ever wear. Honor has already encountered Belle's brother, the slave hunter Donovan, and it looks as though that acquaintanceship may prove difficult for her.

    I'm only 50 or so pages in but loving the book so far, and the needlework aspect of the story - which is clearly going to be of some significance - is an added pleasure.

    What are you reading just now, and where's your book taking you in terms of country and period?