Season's Readings

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I have hardly blogged at all this year. I love it, but life has been incredibly insane. So apologies if you subscribe to my newsletter as this is adapted from one I wrote a couple of years ago called Season’s Readings for the Tea-Hugging and Jumper Swaddled… (and if you don’t, and you like this sort of thing, it’s free and there’s more every few weeks - the sign-up link is at the bottom.)

We’re always told how disconnected we are from the natural rhythm of the seasons in our increasingly digital world, but I don’t think anyone’s told the bookworms. My own bookish corner of Instagram is populated by jumper-swathed introverts who have been counting the days until autumn, season of mists, artfully photographed hot drinks and riotously coloured leaves, begins. We are ready to hibernate! Give us dark nights with rain lashing the windows as we curl up with a warm cat and a big book! Where are my slippers? (Trick question: they are ALWAYS on my feet, who would go unslippered? My toes curl just thinking about it.) How many jumpers is too many jumpers? Can I bring myself to like those weird photogenic teas?

A few years ago I worked on the publicity for a glorious book that acknowledges our need to read seasonally: Francesca Beauman’s The Literary Almanac. Fran is behind Persephone Books in Bath, so she is especially brilliant on undiscovered mid-twentieth century books by women and her infectious enthusiasm and superb writing meant my reading list had tripled in length by the end. Her October recommendations include The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (YES), Lincoln in the Bardo and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, the latter two of which are on my wishlist, and inspired me to gather a few of my own favourite reads for the darkening evenings.

Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter

This collection of short stories presents us with familiar fairy tale heroines and their counterpart beasts, but these are fierce and thorny rewrites. Material reality slinks incongruously into forests and ocean-moated castles: a vampiress hospitably dispenses after-dinner coffee, and the emergency garage’s number awaits the Beast’s stranded guest. A perfect read for dark nights.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

If you need a book to utterly consume you, this epic speculative novel will do the job. The world-building is extraordinary and the tension brilliantly built. It features an apocalyptic vampiric virus, so it might bite a little deeper now than it did when I first read it pre-pandemic.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

What a fiendishly talented man he is, and I use the adjective advisedly. The voyage of the Saardam is apparently haunted by a vicious demon named Old Tom but with such a scurvy crew and so many intriguing secrets aboard all is probably not what it seems. If you like this, Jess Kidd’s The Night Ship has two timelines, with something evil possibly writhing in the hold of the Batavia in the historical one.

The Lighthouse Witches by C. J. Cooke

This couldn’t have been more up my street: generations of women, witch trials, mysterious disappearances, the gothic setting of a Scottish lighthouse. Take my money! Oh, you have. I loved that it was rooted in the real histories of women persecuted as witches in Scotland and it’s tense and creepy with flashes of folk horror.

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry

I am the publicist but also a devotee of Elizabeth’s writing! When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died in November 1912 he was stupefied with surprise grief and gripped by too-late love. They had lived apart at Max Gate for the preceding twenty years and this elegant, atmospheric novel takes us into Hardy’s shattered heart and gloomy house as he remembers the early days of their marriage.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Oh, wow, I just loved this. A beautiful, sprawling fantasy with quests within quests and stories coiling within stories in glimmering lamplight. It gave me the feeling I got reading The Neverending Story aged eleven, and I didn’t think a book could do that for me after all these years. I greatly approve of books about books, books about books about books, cats and booze and this book is stuffed with gorgeous writing on all of these.

On my list to be read for the first time this autumn (limiting myself strictly to volumes already in my house):

I’m halfway through The Fraud by Zadie Smith and predictably utterly hooked. She is such a brilliant, brilliant writer and storyteller and historical fiction is perhaps my favourite genre so this was a completely risk-free hardback investment for me.

More historical fiction in the shape of The Drowned City by K. J. Maitland. Set around a real flood in Bristol in 1606, this thriller in which a prisoner infiltrates the network still at large following the Gunpowder Plot sounds completely amazing.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I couldn’t help myself at Sevenoaks Bookshop recently - it’s signed, and Matrix is a talisman to me. She is a marvel and I can’t wait to dive into this.

The House of Dudley by Joanne Paul for Non-Fiction November: a much-praised deep dive into the Tudor court through the fortunes of the Dudley family. And that cover! Would wear the dress.

Amy Jeffs has written a version of Storyland for children! I’ll be reading this to the kids this autumn and winter and have been very restrained not to devour it myself while we finish our current read together (The October Witches, for more seasonal goodness and a giant pumpkin in a starring role.)

I’d love to hear what’s on your spooky season reading list as the nights draw in…