10 books to read in the autumn
Get your bookshelves primed and ready. Plus: five films to get you in the mood. It's an autumnal extravaganza.
Well, whaddaya know. Give it a couple of weeks, a nip in the air (it’s been almost rudely brisk for September) and the first tinge of leaves on the turn, and I’m willing to embrace the interplay of late summer with the first crisp, bright autumnal days. Before you know it, I’ll come over all Louis MacNeice (‘September has come, it is hers. Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers. Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.’) It was cold enough to warrant at least a discussion about lighting a fire earlier this week, and that decided me: bring on the autumn book list.
I cannot lie: there is a small part of me which hopes that the writing of this might encourage fate to laugh in my face and deliver a final blast of Indian Summer. BUT as generations of boy scouts will tell you, it is good to be prepared. I cannot let my personal reticence get in the way of what the people want. And judging by the proliferation of autumnal messaging - the people are ready. Look: if I don’t act now, you’ll go ahead and start without me. And I can’t have that happen.
The Truants - Kate Weinberg
“What was it about beautiful, mean people that made you want to please them?
Serendipitously, I picked this up at a charity shop at the end of August, which was such perfect timing, I suspect the hand of fate. Murder on the campus? Where do I sign up? (Not to commit said murder, I hasten to add.)
Jess is fleeing her suburban life in Milton View: her chilly, disinterested mother, her parents’ distant marriage, her four siblings (she is, naturally, the odd one out - the piggy-in-the-middle bookworm). She eschewed Oxbridge for a university in Norwich, where she can study under superstar professor: beautiful, charismatic, eccentric Lorna Clay, who trails both clouds of glory and swirling rumours. Lorna’s special subject is Agatha Christie - and the book is pleasingly littered with Easter eggs for the Christie fans out there.
Not only does Jess fall under Lorna’s spell (“I coveted her”), she falls for Georgie - her kind, sexily dishevelled, aristocratic room mate with a fondness for mind-bending substances; Georgie’s boyfriend Alec, a post-grad journalist type; and Nick, a handsome geology student who becomes Jess’s boyfriend. The four of them form a tight-knit renegade band of misfits, sharing secrets, dysfunctional families, bunking off for adventures in Alec’s hearse (yep: he drives a hearse) - whilst being drawn into Lorna’s intimate orbit.
If this sounds all very The Secret History, that’s because it is rather Tartt-esque. It becomes a juicy story of desire, obsession, rivalry in academia and love, and an absolute belter of a web of lies, deceit and trust. Is Lorna saviour or foe? Who is sinned against than sinning - and who are the sinners? It’s twisty and teasing and thrilling.
Crampton Hodnet - Barbara Pym
“She knew exactly how she ought to feel, for she was well read in our greater and lesser English poets, but the unfortunate fact was that she did not really like being kissed at all.”
If you have spend any time at all with me, you will know that I love BP. She is clever and caustic and has an unerring eye for the foibles, whims and small sadnesses of life. Her novels are never not a delight. They are are also havens of Englishness. Of afternoon tea with buttered crumpets. Spinsters in cardigans. Biscuit tins and careful economies. Awkward curates and absent academics. They make perfect autumnal reading.
I think of Crampton Hodnet as a satire on a mawkish romantic comedy. It is the most straightforwardly funny of Pym’s novels, littered with ill-advised affairs, romances of a practical persuasion, and the redoubtable Miss Dogget whose “chief work in life was interfering in other people's business and imposing her strong personality upon those who were weaker than herself.” She considers herself the moral arbiter of North Oxford, which gives her licence to interfere at will, and is scandalised to discover that her nephew Francis, a married academic, is carrying on with one his students, the deliciously monikered Barbara Bird. They have even - clutches pearls - been spotted together in the British Museum. Is nothing sacred?
So distracted is Miss Doggett that she misses the drama under her very roof. Her paid companion, pale, put-upon Miss Morrow, is astonished when the lodger, unmarried curate Stephen Latimer, starts to view her as a potential wife. It’s gorgeous stuff.
I leave you with the immortal worlds of the inimitable Doggett.
“Miss Morrow,’ said Miss Doggett in a warning tone, ‘you are not a woman of the world. You cannot possibly know what goes on outside Leamington Lodge.”
Persuasion - Jane Austen
“My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.”
To me, Persuasion is the essential September re-read - the most melancholy and romantic of Austen’s novels (and possibly the best. Controversial? I’ll write more on why I think so another time…). with a quintessentially September heroine. Just as Persuasion is often referred to as Austen’s autumn novel, Anne Elliot was considered an autumnal spinster at the advanced age of 27.
Anne has - as we are ceaselessly reminded - lost her “bloom”. Her brains and good nature are frequently abused, ignored, under-rated and trampled upon by her snobbish, vacuous father and sister, but Anne is no timid Fanny Price. She is self-reflective, a realist, and has the courage of her convictions.
More than any of Austen’s other heroines, Anne knows herself. She accepts her father, Sir Walter, and sister Elizabeth for the profligate, lazy toads (my words, not Austen’s) that they are. She adapts when they rent out the family estate and remove to Bath. She is loyal to her friends. She hesitates to trust oleaginous cousin William. She is even good in a crisis - it is to Anne that Captain Wentworth turns when silly Louisa Musgrove jumps from The Cobb in Lyme Regis - there is “no one so proper, so capable as Anne”. She has “an elegance of mind and sweetness of character” that only the most discerning and best of people can appreciate.
Of which number we count Wentworth, who re-enters stage left, all dashing and successful and highly eligible. Swoon. He pretends not to notice Anne, even though he is obviously still ravaged with love for her and doth protesting overly much. Anne is tortured by it. There’s a lot more in between and the world’s most romantic interplay between letter-writing and a feminist plea for equality of feelings. It’s all HIGHLY satisfactory.
“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”
Let us also not pretend we don’t want to immediately Google this scene. I’ll save you the trouble:
All Among the Barley - Melissa Harrison
“It isn’t easy to conceive when you are growing up, that the world could be any different than how you find it, for the things you first encounter are what normality comes to consist of, and only the passage of time teaches you that your childhood could have been otherwise.”
Edie is fourteen. She is bookish, quiet, and awkward. She lives on a farm in a corner of 1930s Suffolk in which “there’s nothing…that people would want to read about in a book”. But then journalist Constance FitzAllen arrives from London, with the avowed purpose of documenting countryside life. Constance is modern (she wears trousers!), glamorous, unconventional and dazzled Evie. Constance urges Edie to open her eyes - to see life beyond leaving school, marriage, life on the farm.
But as harvest approaches, and Edie fumbles towards a sense of who she is and how she fits in this world (or does she, perhaps, need to find another one?), Constance’s true motives become clear. There is always a dark underbelly here, with the shadows of impending war and the villagers’ belief in witchcraft - which Edie sees but cannot understand. The denouement is a sharp shock which turns the novel on its head.
Harrison’s descriptions of the countryside are a lyrical delight - poignant and so captivating it reminds us to be rooted in the earth and the seasons so “you know yourself to be one in an unending chain of people through the centuries”.
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The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
“The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.”
This study of longing, lost love, and the English obsession with class is my favourite Ishiguro. (This is in danger of turning into a ‘Natasha’s favourites’ newsletter.) It is extraordinarily intimate: Ishiguro does not, for a single beat, drop the voice of Stevens, the emotionally-buttoned-up butler. It is profoundly authentic and deeply engaging.
Stevens has dedicated his life - which spans two world wars - to service. We join him in 1956, as he takes a journey to Cornwall, where Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper and colleague, now lives. As he drives, Stevens reflects on Lord Darlington, the employer to whom he selflessly dedicated much of his adult life and who was perhaps not entirely worthy of this dedication. We also learn of how his professional relationship with Miss Kenton tentatively broached the boundaries of friendship - and even promised love. But can Stevens ever allow a crack of emotion to pierce his dignified restraint? When he does, it is one of the most poignant, heart-wrenching literary moments you will ever encounter.
Just as Stevens’ unspoken words contain multitudes, so does Ishiguro convey multitudes about Englishness and class. It is a beautiful reminder to seize what time we have left: you cannot undo the past.
“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?’
Fifteen Wild Decembers - Karen Powell
“I can’t stop. I won’t.”
Hands up who associates the Bronte sisters with the summer? Thought not. They are in inextricably entwined with the wind-and-rain-lashed moors, wild and bleakly beautiful. As are their novels. I was going to add The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or Agnes Grey to this list, but then remembered this novel, which hinges on the rich inner life of Emily Bronte - and who rises from its pages like a phoenix.
It is a vivid evocation of time, place and sisters. It will transport you to the moors, where Emily - independent of mind and spirit, a bold creature - strides with her dog, Keeper. To the parsonage at Haworth where the close-knit sisters create imaginary worlds as real as the living one - and later sit around the table, writing their novels. Emily’s, of course, scandalised some critics but even those who were “shocked” found themselves “spellbound”. Emily’s response is above. Her death is utterly tragic, as she realises that she has written one great novel, but will never write another.
True story: when we were courting, my husband took me on a trip to Haworth. It was bleak and cold and our B&B overlooked a church and grave yard. The church bell tolled on the hour all night. The room had been cleaned with something so aggressively potent we were both allergic to it. So by the time we toured the Parsonage, we were both wheezing and feeling very appropriately like a Bronte sibling on the brink of expiration.
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
Du Maurier is another author I associate with months where the weather is wild and unpredictable. (I’m beginning to think I might have the weather-version of synesthesia.) There is something unkempt and untameable about her.
Rebecca sends a chill down the spine from that very famous first line ‘Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again’. The second Mrs de Winter (we never learn her name - she is simply ‘my wife’ or ‘my dear’) is haunted by the ghost of the first: the beautiful, talented Rebecca, who drowned. The timid, shy second heroine fears her husband will never love her as he did Rebecca, nor can she escape the hold Rebecca had over Manderley - particularly the deeply sinister Mrs Danvers, who has a pathological obsession with her dead mistress.
Even writing about it gives me the eebie jeebies. It’s dark and brilliant and Rebecca is a phantom who haunts the novel - “vicious, damnable, rotten through and through”. We end it complicit in murder, expelled from the Eden of Manderley.
The Dutch House - Ann Patchett
“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
There is something of the twisted fairytale about Patchett’s eighth novel.
The Dutch House is by way of a folly - a neo-classical monument to ambition bought by self-made Cyril Conroy as a surprise for his family. It has vast windows, Delft mantelpieces, a gilt ceiling “more in keeping with Versailles than Eastern Pennsylvania”, and comes complete with the possession and servants of the former owner. It’s too much for wife Elna, who seems to shrink in face of such grandeur and flees to India. Her children Maeve and Danny are left to the tender ministrations of the staff (two sisters), until a pretender steps in. Cunning Andrea is soon their (wicked) stepmother, and installed in the house with her two daughters. After Cyril’s untimely death, she sews up their inheritance and ejects his children - who develop a ritual of watching Andrea and her daughters in their old house.
In an ideal world, you would listen to Tom Hanks (yes, THE Tom Hanks reads the audiobook) read this, whilst you are taking a walk on a perfect, crisp, blue-sky winter day. Leaves crunching underfoot and Tom Hanks’ dulcet tones in your ear: perfect.
The Overstory - Richard Powers
“Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all”
Seamlessly I move to a book I read because it was recommended by Ann Patchett - who calls it “one of the best novels”, Barack Obama loved it, and it won the Pulitzer. Really, I’m not sure you need anything else from me, to be frank. Suffice to say it is a book which will alter the way you think about trees forever.
It is a curious and wonderful thing with many roots, as the stories of perfect strangers intertwine - novellas within the novel. It is a vital, important book around which to bend your mind. And TREES. Perfect to start as the leaves start falling.
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
“You're in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that's enough.”
Spooky fantasy (spantasy?) books are popular this time of year - although, personally, I’d argue these fit into the ‘books to read in October’ bracket. But I am nothing if not judiciously fair and willing to bow to reason. And I need little excuse to include this delightfully whimsical tale of magic, illusion and a circus which even people who (whispers it) don’t really like the circus (me) will long to visit.
We begin with two rival magicians: Prospero the Enchanter and the mysterious "man in the grey suit" or Mr. A. H. Their rivalry is played over the generations by their appointed pupils: Celia, Bowen’s daughter, and an orphan who will be called Marco Alisdair. These two are bound by their lifelong, obsessive competition, and by the Night Circus, a glorious place of eccentricity and fantastical wonder.
It’s a feat of imagination which soars high and wide until "You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream".
Bonus: 5 Autumnal Films to please your eyes
When Harry Met Sally - The classic. Peerless in every way. Will make you want to fall in love your best friend, whilst walking through Central Park wearing a hat and a cream cable knit.
Little Women - Greta Gerwig’s adaptation is strong on cosy interiors, scribbling in the attic, and rural America in the fall, all swirling leaves and melancholy nostalgia. See also: a cast of dreams. The whole thing feels lit by firelight.
Mona Lisa Smile - Oft-forgotten and, let us be honest, maligned Julia Roberts/Julia Stiles movie, but excellent progressive feminist teaching from Julia, and very strong campus movie style.
You’ve Got Mail - I make no apologies for two Nora Ephron/Meg Ryan vehicles here. I hadn’t actually seen this film until recently (I KNOW), but it’s as much a love letter to bookshops (small, independent ones, not large conglomerates) as it is New York in the autumn, and the power of the written word.
Good Will Hunting - A very young Matt Damon’s genius college cleaner solves maths equations, hang out with his best friend, and falls in love with Minnie Driver’s (a very under-rated actress imho and her memoir is well worth a read) Skylar. Robin Williams is on Oscar-willing form as his therapist. Clever and cockle-warrming.
Right, I’m off to find myself a cable knit. Or maybe just a quiet corner and a Dorothy L. Sayers.
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“So by the time we toured the Parsonage, we were both wheezing and feeling very appropriately like a Bronte sibling on the brink of expiration.” I’m sorry, but this just made me burst out laughing:)
I now must read The Truants, which I hadn’t heard of before. I second The Dutch House, and absolutely all those films - I just rewatched You’ve Got Mail, and it was delicious.
Oh I love most of these, and the ones I’m not familiar with I shall make sure I read soon!
And thank you for the clip of THE best adaptation of Persuasion (IMO).. I love Anne’s desperate run around the crescent and Rupert Penry-Jones is a perfect Captain Wentworth!
And that little tear running down Anne’s cheek.. absolute perfection! Sally Hawkins is sublime ❤️