I don't know if any fellow posters are familiar with the work of WG Seabald, but I would unhesitatingly recommend his three great works The Emigrants; The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. These are books which, generically, are impossible to classify: fiction, history, memoir, reflection... profound meditations on the horrors of twentieth century history, imperialism, genocide etc. as well as what he terms the 'natural history of destruction'.(Seabald was German, but spent much of his life in the UK. He was Professor of German at the University of East Anglia when he died after suffering a heart attack and crashing his car two years back). I keep the Rings of Saturn by my bedside and find myself drawn to it practically every night: it's, on one level, a record of the narrator's walking tour around the eerie, haunted landscape of the East Anglian and Suffolk coasts, in which he encounters the ghostly appariations of history in the traces evidenced in the landscape. But on another it connects a fiercely local environment to the greater forces of world history as well as to the narrator's (fictional?) biography. Really wonderful writing.
Any readers who relish Iain Sinclair's excursions through London's psycho-geograhical landscape would, I reckon, take to Seabald (if they haven't already done so).