Sansom is perhaps best known for his creation of the Tudor hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, the central character in a series of seven novels. Sansom has written two novels set in the C20th: Winter in Madrid (2006) set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, and Dominion (2012) which imagines an alternative history in which the allies lost the Second World War and the Nazis are in control of 1950s Britain.