As lamps are lit earlier and the scent of woodsmoke emanates down terraced streets, this season of mists is the ideal time to hunker down with a seasonal classic.

You know where you are with autumn. No forlorn hope for sunshine, or obligation to travel far from home. Of all the seasons, autumn alone, delivers on her promises, bringing encroaching darkness and sodden skies, as well as the night of All Hallows on the last night of October.

As most of us continue to beat a retreat homeward, it seems fitting to draw the curtains and light a few candles, before pulling on a faithful jumper and settling in with a nourishing, atmospheric novel.

On All Hallows’ Eve

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

‘Hallowe’en was the night when the force of evil was at its most powerful, when witches were free to consort with the devil.’

Seasonal inspiration abounds at the aptly named Apple Trees - home of Rowena Drake, whose kitchen table is laden with carved pumpkins and candles flicker atop stone mantlepieces. At her All Souls’ party the village witch arrives to tell fortunes, whilst upstairs in the library a child lies drowned in a bucket after a game of apple bobbing.

Famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate by the novelist Ariadne Oliver, who, having discovered the body, promptly takes to her bed, leaving Poirot to tramp through eerie woodland and misty english gardens in search of the killer.

To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

One of my favourite stories when I was a child, as with all great books, I feel real trepidation about revisiting it as an adult. Fearing the magic may, somehow, have diminished, or more likely that its poignant themes of race will have become increasingly loaded as an adult.

Nevertheless a classic for all ages, the book is set in 1930s Alabama and narrated by six-year-old Scout Finch, whose father, Atticus, is a lawyer. The trial of a local black man, Tom Robinson, is the major plot line, but the night of the Halloween pageant in the high school auditorium, where Scout is made to dress up as a ham, is a key chapter in setting up the novel’s ending.

On Fireside Afternoons

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

From the gloomy, forbidding setting of Thornfield Hall, inhabited by the brooding Mr Rochester, to screams in the night and unexplained happenings, autumn was made for gothic novels.

This masterpiece by the eldest Brontë sister is a romance, mystery, and psychological thriller all rolled into one. It is also a quintessentially Victorian novel with requisite ‘ghost’, best enjoyed under a blanket.

The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford

Capturing the eccentricities of an English upper-class family perfectly, this first of a trilogy of Mitford’s books is a delight. Closely modelled on Mitford's own family, the Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity.

Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows the spirited Radlett children through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

Mitford’s ability to combine comical everyday with tragic events is superb. And all three books offer ideal escapism to another time, place and set of rules.

On Chilling Nights

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The hound, the hound! Whilst Holmes enjoys the lamp-lit safety of 221B Baker Street, where Mrs Hudson can be relied upon to keep the home fires burning, Watson travels by train to the blackened, misted landscape of Dartmoor.

With a gigantic, snarling hound on the loose and a murderer escaped nearby Princeton, it’s full of atmospheric decriptions of the treacherous moorland by nightfall, with suspicious activity even inside the house where Watson’s is a guest.

The Woman In Black By Susan Hill

The scariest ghost story I know of: The requisite haunted house is surrounded by marshes and sea frets, and is reached via a causeway, so come high tide, is completely cut off from the mainland.

Beginning on Christmas Eve, Arthur Kipps recounts a traumatic tale, which seems him travel alone from London to Crythin Gifford, a small market town on the north east coast of England to see to the affairs of the late Mrs Alice Drablow.

At her funeral, Kipps glimpses a woman dressed in black and while sorting through papers at Eel Marsh House, he endures an increasingly terrifying sequence of unexplained noises and chilling events.

On Really Grey Days

The Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling

‘Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.’

A return to Hogwarts is, for me, essential comfort during both autumn and winter months. As the leaves turn and we brace ourselves for the clocks going back, escaping into the Michelmas term with Harry, Ron and Hermione is balm for the soul.

From the season’s opening quidditch match, with onlookers wrapped up in striped house scarves, to the annual Halloween feast, where clouds of bats swoop overhead: It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve read them, or in what order, Rowling’s world of seasonal spells and potions never falters. (See Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, chapter 9 if you’re looking to dive in amongst a troop of dancing skeletons and carved pumpkins the size of garden sheds.)

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

‘Iron hand of the past grasping at my entrails.’

The third book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, Gaudy Night follows protagonist Harriet Vane as she returns to her alma mater of Shrewsbury College, Oxford.

Invited back to the all-female Shrewsbury College for the annual feasting (gaudy) celebrations, Harriet arrives to find a poison-pen poltergeist is on the loose, carrying out a series of malicious acts around the college.

Filled with thrills and suspense, Sayers brings the honey-coloured architecture and spires of Oxford vividly to life. The mysterious narrative is interwoven with themes of women's struggles with their prescribed roles within the climate of 1930s England, that saw this described as ‘the first feminist mystery novel’.

Sink into Harriet’s confrontation of her own use of academia as an intellectual and emotional refuge, as the love story with Lord Peter reaches its long-awaited conclusion.

Happy escapism x