BOOK THREAD. Can you give me your favourite novels which build a picture of a single place - city, town or community - through multiple characters, families, even eras?

Delighted and overwhelmed by all these recommendations and, as ever, the strange, mathematically-improbable doom that falls over me when I start thinking everyone has read all of these hundreds of books but me, and I am a worthless, illiterate worm.

Right. Increasingly starting to think I should have just said "Guys what's your favourite book that has words, or at the very least letters, in it?"