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I've recently completed Stephen Baxter's "Northland" trilogy, which comprises "Stone Spring", "Bronze Summer", and "Iron Winter". As well as writing hard SF, Baxter's written a number of "alternate history" series, of which this is one - and a very good one.
The first book, "Stone Spring", is set about 7000 BC, when sea levels are rising at the end of the last ice age. A woman, Ana, leader of a small community living in the "Northland", which is the area of land now under the English Channel and North Sea, decides to fight the rising sea levels by building a series of flood defences and dykes to hold back the sea, and this small act sets in chain a whole series of historical events which change the entire future history of the world.
The second book, "Bronze Summer", is set 6000 years later than the first, around 1300 BC. The Hittite Empire is collapsing (as it did, historically), but a Hittite queen comes to Northland, the most powerful and technologically-advanced nation in Europe, for aid.
In the final book, set around 1300 AD, Northland now has steam power and a system of railways and steam ships, but something odd is happening to the climate of the world. Can anything be done about it? This is now a very different world to our own. The preservation of the Hittite Empire means that Rome never developed as a world power, and Jesus, sent to the Hittite governor of Judea for judgement, was exiled to the Hittite capital, rather than executed, where he become a prominent philosopher and subsequently entered the Hittite pantheon as a minor deity.
An excellent series exploring how minor changes can result in a completely different path to world history. Highly recommended.
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