After a seemingly endless summer, it’s finally autumn, meaning fewer long days out in the sunshine and many more curled up on the sofa, with the company of a blanket, a streaming hot cuppa and a cosy novel to tear through. These are the eight to read now, running the gamut from literary classics and pacy thrillers to tearjerkers and life-affirming romances.
The patient zero of dark academia novels, Donna Tartt’s delicious campus caper follows six closely entangled Classics students at a snowy Vermont liberal arts college as they become embroiled in an unspeakable crime. Unfolding in wood-panelled classrooms and dusty libraries, against the backdrop of blustery, unforgiving weather, this is a book which chills you to the bone and feels designed to be read by candlelight, on an ice-cold, stormy night. If it has, somehow, passed you by over the last three decades, now is the time to pick up a copy.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
If you’ve seen Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning reimagining of this extraordinary piece of historical fiction, then you’ll know it’s about an earth-shattering loss – the titular son of Shakespeare who died tragically aged just 11. But, the book, especially, is about so much more than that, too: it’s a crucial reframing and centring of the bard’s wife, Agnes, who, in this telling, is a witchy herbalist, strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, endlessly resourceful and resilient, and single-handedly holding her family together while her husband is off penning plays in London. The novel’s vividness, its wild leaps of imagination and its almost mystical connection to its environment make it a modern classic. One to pack for your next autumnal countryside walk.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
From its indelible first sentence – “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again” – this Gothic thriller transports you to the foggy, atmospheric Cornish coast, where nothing is quite as it seems. Yes, a portion of the story plays out in the gilded splendour of sun-soaked Monte Carlo, where our timid, unnamed narrator meets and falls for wealthy widower Maxim de Winter, but soon, the couple have come home to their imposing seaside estate, managed by the terrifying housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, as a calcified memorial to the last Mrs de Winter, the impossibly glamorous and intimidating Rebecca. Darker than the Hitchcock adaptation of the same name, it’s guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine – and impossible to get out of your head.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
A twisted love letter to the rich, butter-heavy delicacies you’re likely to consume in the depths of winter in Tokyo, this drool-worthy romp centres on two women: reporter Rika Machida and Manako Kajii, a food-obsessed tabloid sensation accused of murdering a string of older men. While visiting the latter at a detention centre, and in a bid to gain her confidence, the former asks her for her best home recipes. So begins a strange and disturbing sort-of-friendship through which our heroine is instructed to indulge in a series of delectable meals by her new acquaintance: a steaming bowl of midnight butter ramen, a dense French pound cake, buttery spaghetti with cod roe, and the gloriously simple but mind-blowing combination of fluffy rice, cold butter and a single drop of soy sauce. The result is a profound personal awakening unlike anything else. Prepare to devour this thick slab of a novel, and then make and slurp up every single dish described in it.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Many Jane Austen romances feel innately summery in tone, but the author’s last completed novel has a distinctly autumnal spirit. It traces the sorrows of Anne Elliot, an old maid at 27 – it’s 1814, FYI – who was, many years ago, persuaded to give up the love of her life, the sombre Captain Wentworth. When chance reunites them, with their fortunes and circumstances reversed, will their affection for each other remain, or be overshadowed by nearly a decade of regret and heartache? The sparkling wit, satirical humour and love triangles – all the things we’ve come to expect from the writer – remain, but with the relative maturity, meatiness and emotional resonance of this work, it feels more suited to cooler climes, a time of quiet contemplation versus all-out revelry.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Irish virtuoso’s first three novels – Conversations with Friends, and Beautiful World, Where Are You – all feature sunny holidays in mainland Europe, making them ideal beach reads. Not so for her fourth: a more melancholy but then ultimately heartening two-hander set between Dublin and the country’s northwest, which tracks a pair of brothers drifting apart and coming together in the aftermath of their father’s death. They fall in and out of love, their lives intersecting with that of each other’s partners in unexpected ways, and slowly stagger from the throes of grief to reconciliation, with Rooney’s talent for precise observation and aching sensuality fully intact. A novel to be inhaled in a cosy café over countless cups of coffee, with a view of turning leaves and gentle drizzle.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Perhaps no book is more primed for autumn than the operatic (and mutually destructive) love story of Cathy and Heathcliff, a tale of overwhelming desire and reckless revenge set on the windswept Yorkshire moors. Unlike its many big-screen retellings, the novel is a knottier and more complicated beast: a slippery, perspective-shifting, decades-spanning melodrama involving multiple generations scarred by the sins of their forefathers and rooted in an epic, unforgettable landscape. As haunting as it is sublime.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
How long does it take for a new novel to become a certified classic? In the case of this tender, slow-burning, small miracle of a book, published mere months ago, the answer is no time at all. It opens during the summer holidays, when middle-aged schoolteacher Daphne goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and somehow runs into her lost stepfather, Eddie, whom she last saw more than four decades ago. The rekindling of their friendship over the next few weeks and months transports them, and the narrative, back to the ’80s, to a freezing, snowy winter which profoundly altered the course of both of their lives. Reading is akin to slipping into a hot bath from which you never wish to emerge. When you finally do, though, you’re sated and reborn, with a renewed faith in humanity.
