Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Starting off with an absolute classic, literally. Little Women follows the story of four sisters navigating sisterhood, friendship and hardship. Despite its 1860s backdrop, this novel has an absolutely timeless quality. From my grandmother to me, it has been a generational favourite for as long as I can remember.
A Man Called Ove, Frederik Backman
If there was an award for the most loveable yet irritable man in literature- Ove takes top spot. We follow a protagonist who is unwaveringly principled and constantly unsmiling, but incredibly hard not to love– making him the perfect candidate for your next grumpy comfort character. This book simultaneously achieves dark thematic undertones and literary relationships that could easily serve as anthropological studies as well as fiction; something I have yet to see done so
effortlessly elsewhere.
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet is a historical fiction novel following the domestic life that William Shakespeare left behind; named after the playwright’s only son. O’Farrell’s incredibly sensitive novel shines a light on something that is often left out of Shakespeare’s story– his wife and children in Stratford-upon-Avon. She reminds readers of the family abandonment that was perhaps depressingly necessary for the groundbreaking plays that we often take for granted today.
O’Farrell asks: what is the cost of great art?– that is the question.
Stoner, John Williams
Following a man’s journey through, and relationship with education, Stoner encapsulates the dark academia aesthetic decades before the term even emerged. This incredibly gripping yet artistically spiritless story feels like waking up on a dreary winter morning, every, single, day. Williams undermines the classic 1960s American dream through Stoner’s tale of perpetual disappointment, a 20th Century take on Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, if you will. And if that doesn’t scream Autumn I don’t know what does.
The Doll: Short Stories, Daphne Du Maurier
This earlier, lesser known collection of Du Maurier’s short stories have the concurrent feeling of a lost manuscript and classically Gothic slices of terror, having the potential of chilling the reader more than a cold November morning. Ranging from stories narrating the battle between superstition and modernity (such as East Wind), to darkly sexual tales of obsession (such as the title story, The Doll); this collection has everything you could desire from the Gothic, a genre which is so intrinsically autumnal.
Illustration via Cherish Stotesbury for The Student