It's Raining Again...
Last time we promised something for the first rainy afternoon. Well, here it is. It's been raining for four days, and it isn't officially autumn yet, but the sky has clearly voted early. So before you light the fire and put on a jumper, here are five books for the in-between: warm enough for the sofa, strange enough to make the weather feel like part of the plot.
Start with Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, highly recommend if you've got a grey afternoon and it’s Saturday. A man lives alone in an endless house of infinite halls, tides, and statues, and he is, as far as he can tell, perfectly content. Then someone starts asking questions he can't answer. It's the strange one we promised — dreamlike, hushed, unlike anything else on this list — and it rewards exactly the kind of attention a rainy weekend gives you. Read it somewhere quiet. Don't rush it. It's not a book you finish so much as surface from, blinking, wondering how long you've been gone. Recommended snack: those French butter crisps everyone’s been banging on about.
If that sounds too much like hard work and you want something short, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A coal merchant in a small Irish town makes a delivery to the local convent, and sees something there he can't unsee. Under 120 pages and every one of them earns its place — Keegan doesn't waste a word, and by the end you'll wonder how she said so much with so little. This is the book for the evening it gets dark at half five, when you want something that matches the weight of that, not something that fights it. Recommended snack: After Eights and a small Irish Whisky.
Maybe you'd rather the weather outside matched the book. The Guest List by Lucy Foley — a wedding on a remote island off the Irish coast, a storm that cuts the guests off from the mainland, and by the end of the night, someone is dead. Told from half a dozen points of view, all of them lying about something. Wind, rain, no phone signal, and it's paced to keep you turning pages while actual rain does the same thing outside your actual window. Recommended snack: cake.
Or Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, if you want something verging on humid. A young woman travels to a decaying mansion in the Mexican countryside to check on her newly married cousin, and finds the house — and the family in it — very wrong. Think Rebecca with mould in the walls and something worse underneath them. Damp, dark, unsettling, which is exactly the register for a week where the sky hasn't cleared since Tuesday. Recommended snack: nachos, obviously.
And then The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, because not every rainy afternoon needs atmosphere. Four retirees in a country retirement village meet weekly to investigate cold cases, until a real murder happens on their doorstep. It's funny — properly funny — and warm in a way none of the others are, which is exactly why it's here. Some rainy afternoons need atmosphere. Some just need company. This is the one for when you want to feel like you're in good hands, not bad weather. Recommended snack: tea and biscuits, preferably custard creams.
Nola