There is a particular melancholy that belongs to autumn, the feeling of time passing, of places becoming memories, of light slowly withdrawing from the world.
The books on this list share that particular autumnal melancholy. Some take us through lonely cities and quiet rooms; others turn towards paintings, museums, memory or the passing of time. They are books of wandering and looking, of being alone without necessarily being lonely. Their worlds are often subdued, introspective and slightly removed from the noise of everyday life.
These are books to read slowly, perhaps with a cup of tea beside you, while the light fades earlier outside the window.
1 Compass by Mathias Enard
Mathias Énard’s Compass is one of the most intellectually stimulating novels I have ever read: a hypnotic, melancholic, and erudite meditation on memory, history, love, and cultural identity. Part love story, part cultural essay, and part insomniac stream of consciousness, the novel transforms a single sleepless night in Vienna into a vast exploration of centuries of exchange between Europe and the Middle East. Dense with references to music, literature, travel, and history, Compass becomes a literary and intellectual labyrinth. Yet beneath its extraordinary scholarly richness lies a deeply human concern: the fragility of cultural memory and the loneliness of individuals who live between worlds. Énard insists throughout that East and West are not opposing civilisations but deeply intertwined speres shaped through centuries of mutual influence. Written amid the conflicts and divisions of the 2010s Middle East, the novel mourns the destruction of deeply interconnected cosmopolitan cultural worlds and historical ties that once existed. It is ultimately an elegy for fragile human connections that survive only through art, literature, and memory. FULL REVIEW
2 So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgaard
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgård is a deeply personal meditation on Edvard Munch’s art and on why paintings affect us. Knausgård writes in his characteristically introspective style, moving between Munch’s paintings and reflections on memory, death, loneliness, love, creativity, and what happens between a painting and the person standing before it. The title suggests that a painting, a relatively small physical object, can contain immense emotional and existential depth. Art is able to compresses vast human experience into a confined space. It allows us to encounter another person’s inner world. Knausgård encourages us to look slowly: to stand still, to keep looking, and to allow the meaning of a painting to emerge gradually. Sometimes a painting that initially seems unremarkable becomes unforgettable after prolonged, careful attention. He suggests that art cannot remove suffering or answer life’s deepest questions. What it can do is to remind us that someone else has experienced the same fears and longings. In that recognition, we feel less alone. The book leaves us with a renewed sense that paintings are companions to return to throughout life. Over time, they begin to shape the way we look at the world.
3 Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
In Madonna in a Fur Coat, we witness the development of ‘love’ from the perspective of a young, extremely sensitive Turkish man, Raif Efendi. Ali’s writing offers probably one of the best descriptions of a sensitive man, deeply emphatic soul. Madonna in a Fur Coat’ is a pure definition of ‘melancholy’ and yearning for missed opportunities in life. We follow the life of Raif during the 1920s and 1930s while he lives in Berlin, Istanbul and Ankara. While in Berlin, he meets a Jewish woman, Maria and they become the loves of each other’s lives. Their love, at times, appears to be more platonic, than romantic; marred by the complexity of their respective backgrounds, social norms, and by the struggles caused by the mundanes of life. The character of Raif Efendi is so skillfully outlined, his inner life is well depicted in this short book.
4 Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis
Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis is a deeply reflective and thoughtful novel with subtle elements of magical realism and a dreamlike atmosphere exploring themes of isolation, loneliness, solitude, the invisibility of people, their emotional displacement from the past, the impact of history on one’s life, the relationship between the city and the self-conveying the complexities of the inner life. The novel also captures the essence of Berlin and its abandoned spaces layered with history and life of a young immigrant woman searching for a sense of belonging. It offers the portrayal of post-Wall Berlin and the intricacies associated with the identity. Set in post – reunification Berlin of 2000s Book of Clouds tells a story of Tatiana, a young Jewish-Mexican woman in her late 20s. We meet her around 2007 at the time when she had been living in Berlin for the past five years and currently working as a transcriber for the reclusive elderly Jewish historian Dr Friedrich Weiss. As readers, we follow Tatiana as she spends her listless days in Berlin, being a solivagant, often doing solitary walks around the city and occasionally meeting the lonely and invisible to other Berliners. Book of Clouds has become one of my favourite books. Writing is deeply contemplative and soul soothing. FULL REVIEW
5 All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
All the Beauty in the World has become one of my favourite books I have read in recent years. It is a book that anyone who wants to enrich their experience of visiting museums or galleries should read. This beautiful exploration of grief and art is deeply soul-soothing and offers solace during moments of anxiety. In All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley offers a thoughtful, meditative, and deeply introspective memoir about the relationship between art, perception, and grief. Following the death of his brother, Tom, and his departure from a career in publishing at The New Yorker, Bringley assumes a position as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he spends the next ten years in a role marked by stillness, enabling a deeper engagement with the artworks that surround him on a daily basis. In this stillness, he reflects not only on art, but on the relationship between artworks and the people who look at them, and ultimately on what it means to truly see the world. Art is depicted as a medium through which human experiences are preserved and contemplated. At the heart of the book lies the idea that art preserves fleeting moments. FULL REVIEW
6 Brian by Jeremy Cooper
Brian is a profoundly moving meditation on the meaning of solitary life, of art and cinema in shaping one’s perception of and connection with the world, of the hidden depths of human soul often kept private in fear of misunderstanding and stigma, and of the importance of companionship and community. This is a subtle novel of great depth focused on the interiority of life enriched by art. Jeremy Cooper thoughtfully and empathetically chronicled life of a gentle soul spanning thirty years starting in the early 1990s all the way up to the present times. Brian is a Northern Irish man in his late 30s when we meet him in the novel. In the early years of his professional working life Brian tried his best to socialise but he struggled with the rules of small talk and social cues. He never knew what to say to anyone. He holds a clerical role at the Camden Housing Department, and previously he worked as a clerk at the large builder’s merchant company in Clapham in South London. As an antidote to self-inflicted solitude, Brian became a member of the British Film Institute (BFI). Films made him feel less alone. Anonymity remained an integral part of Brian’s pleasure in going to the cinema. As his retirement approached, Brian had mixed feelings about stopping work. He was anxious about how to occupy the empty days ahead. Within three years of his retirement, we witness Brian experiencing problems with his sight and memory. This is the time when we as readers depart Brian. FULL REVIEW
7 Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Written in forty-six short vignettes, Whereabouts portrays daily wanderings and inner workings of the narrator’s mind who is a solitary unnamed woman in her mid 40s working as a teacher and living in the unnamed city in Italy. Whereabouts is an exploration of urban solitude, alienation, loneliness, growing old, with the narrator’s beautiful ruminations and perceptive thoughts infused with a profound sense of nostalgia veiled in gentle melancholy, on the meaning of living a solitary life, inspired by the locations of daily errands. The narrator is a very sensitive and astute observer of other people’s words, emotions, and gestures. She often reflects on how we cross our paths with others on our daily errands, often without exchanging any words, often just having the presence of other person as a reference point. Throughout the pages of Whereabouts, the narrator attempts to locate her own place in the world, she is in the quest of an identity as well as emotional home where her body and soul can sense they belong. This book exudes some sort of yearning for a new attachment without a burden of geographical and cultural frontiers which makes Whereabouts truly universal in terms of the protagonist’s depicted emotions and thoughts. There is a very interesting depiction of the silence in the book which induce some sort of solace and calmness. That presence of aloneness on the pages of Whereabouts is very soothing for the reader. Whereabouts is a stunning and reflective book, a remarkable ode to a wonder of an ‘ordinary’ life. Lahiri’s writing is enchanting, subtle, delicate, and very precise; every single word has its own deserved place on the page. In many aspects, this book conveys universal existence, eradicating those geographical belongings and identities. I highly recommend this book to everyone who loves gentle and thoughtful writing. FULL REVIEW
8 Autumn Rounds by Jacques Poulin
utumn Rounds by the Canadian writer, Jacques Poulin is a gentle, tender, luminous and deeply meditative novel exploring the meaning of solitude, literature in our life, human connections, growing old and finding love at mature age. It is also an ode to the natural beauty of the Quebec landscapes and their power to heal physical and emotional wounds. Writing is subtle and delicate to reflect the inner life of the main protagonist, the Driver and people he encounters during his journey. Poulin’s prose conveys soothing melancholy in which characters in his book find the air of comfort. Autumn Rounds tells a story of a gentle middle-aged man referred to as the Driver who runs a mobile library travelling around Quebec along the north bank St Lawrence River visiting little towns and villages lending his books to the readers with their unique tastes for great literature. He is a sensitive character, with firm convictions and empathy for his fellow human beings as well as animals. During his rounds, the Driver meets a variety of readers, some of them are damaged people, or going through a heartbreak or depression, experiencing sleepless nights, with unique interests in the literary works of art. Ultimately this is a quiet and gentle read with a sensitive character, the Driver at its centre with many ruminations on ordinary life and daily tasks and activities making one’s existence a bit less painful. FULL REVIEW
9 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym published in 1977 (and nominated for the Booker Prize) is a poignant exploration of loneliness. This is a story of four single people in their 60s: Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman who have worked together for several years in an office in Central London doing unspecified clerical work. They don’t socialise together out of work, they don’t have any close relatives, they live alone and lead what one could define as a rather quiet life. Romantic love has never become a part of their lives. Despite their advanced age, two of them still live in rented single rooms. Pym is an excellent chronicler of an ordinary and unnoticed life with focus on single elderly people and their fate as they face health problems as well as housing and financial insecurity. Quartet in Autumn has moved me deeply. It is a thought provoking character study which portrays an emotional baggage of four characters as they grow old facing isolation and loneliness. This book also constitutes an interesting commentary on the British society of the 1970s and its attitude towards the ongoing social and cultural changes especially when it comes to treatment of immigrants. Writing is beautiful, lyrical and multilayered. There is nostalgia and wry humour. If you love the likes of Anita Brookner, Penelope Fitzgerald or Patrick Modiano, you will also enjoy Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. It is a great read, especially during long autumnal evenings. FULL REVIEW
10 M Train by Patti Smith
Written in poetic, luminous, melancholic and fragmentary prose M Train by Patti Smith is an introspective non-chronological and non-linear memoir capturing the texture of fleeting moments and the rich landscape of a sensitive artistic soul contemplating the meaning of artistic influences, solitude, loss, memory, the mystical nature of travel and the importance of small mundane rituals in everyday life. In M Train Patti Smith takes a reader on a journey to various places across the world following the footsteps of writers and artists who inspired her throughout her life. Patti travels to French Guyana and Berlin to look for places once visited by Jean Genet whose book The Thief’s Journal then accompanies her on her bus ride from Madrid to Valencia; to Mexico City to connect with the memories of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; to Weimar to see the house in which once Nietzsche lived; to London where she walks along the famous Charing Cross Road known for independent bookstores where she buys the first edition of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees and a copy of Ibsen’s plays; to Lawrence, Kansas to visit William Burroughs where she sees him living “in a modest house, with his cats, his books (…)”; to Cambridge after reading about the scuffle between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at King’s College and to visit Wittgenstein’s grave in Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge; to Tangier to interview Paul Bowles in the late 1990s whose flat’s walls and halls were lined with books, “books that [she] knew and books [she] wished to know”; to Kamakura and Tokyo to find the places related to Osamu Dazai, Mishima, Murakami, Akutagawa, Kawabata, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa: M Train is a beautiful and comforting book that shows the rich tapestry of human experience and explores the landscape of one’s soul providing a deeply rewarding reading experience. It also constitutes a compelling testament to the enduring power of books and literature in one’s life. FULL REVIEW
