Is there such a thing as a sense of place? Do places have atmospheres that we can sense? And how can historical novelists harness these responses in their fiction? I recently spoke to best-selling author Nicola Cornick about her timeslip novels for the Historical Novels Review, February 2022. The article is republished here and is also available on my website as a PDF document.  At a 2021 conference on ‘Imagining History: Wales in Fiction and Fact’, Dr Marian Gwyn remarked, “historical fiction teaches us how people and places connect”. (1) For readers of historical fiction, a sense of place is an important element establishing not only the physical milieu of a novel, but also the historical one. This is often achieved, as the familiar mantra has it, by evoking the “sights, sounds and smells” of a setting, that is, through the senses of the people in it. A sense of place is created by the characters connected with it. However, setting may have another function besides conveying a...