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THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. WALKING the dogs this week, I found myself treading on a carpet of freshly dropped shiny conkers and felt outrage. What is the matter with children today? How can they sit at home in their cyber worlds and ignore all these riches? Just William would bop them with his catapult.

It seems like seasons are out of fashion, and you can see why: they’re disappointing. Summers are soggy, winters muggy, but that’s not true of this time of year. Autumn can be relied upon: it always delivers.

And it’s glorious: its colours, its fruit, its proper weather. E.M. Delafield’s The Diary Of A Provincial Lady — one of the wittiest books ever — begins every section in autumn.

For our chipper housewife it’s a busy time. The hyacinths need planting (quite a drama), children’s trunks need packing and aunts must be prevented from making their famous marrow jam. But then it’s set in the late Thirties, when conkers were thrilling and one would never dream of buying a hyacinth already in bloom.

After so many years spent as pupil, student and then mother, autumn, with its full pencil cases and new timetables, always feels to me like the real beginning of the year.

So it is for Richard in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. He’s just turned up from California to start at an elite college in Vermont, and the ‘fall’ there takes his breath away: ‘Leaves ankledeep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes . . .’ Heaven. And for Richard the start of a whole new life.

Barbara Pym’s Quartet In Autumn tries to take a more negative view. Her four characters, all in their 60s, are preparing for a lonely, vulnerable future. Letty’s terrified of going into a care home: ‘Better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaves and bracken and wait quietly for death.’

But in the end, she feels a sudden surge of optimism, and sees that, despite it all, ‘life still held infinite possibilities for change’.

Of course. Because autumn’s too good to miss, that’s why.