What to read in September - our 5 top picks

It might be grim up north this month in a Yorkshire stately home and on the Isle of Lewis, but there’s light relief on Mull – and happier times to be had in the southwest

Saga Magazine's book choices for September
Image credit: Saga Magazine
By Rose Shepherd | Published - 22 Aug 2024
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Our pick

Death at the sign of the rook - Kate Atkinson

Penguin Books - RRP: £22

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Makepeace House is mouldering away in its deer park, like Downton Abbey on life support.

They’ve sold a Rembrandt, a Titian – and now a Turner has gone missing, along with Lady Milton’s charming assistant. Can the family fortunes be revived by the opening of a hotel hosting murder weekends?

Devoted fans of Atkinson’s endearing ex-cop and private sleuth Jackson Brodie and the plucky DC Reggie Chase will thrill to this droll whodunnit. (Who done what? Stole paintings? That’s the least of it! Even patricide is possible.)

Join the hapless guests snowed in with a bunch of third-rate thespians and with a psychopath on the loose. What a scream!

The Black Loch - Peter May

Quercus Publishing - RRP £22

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Another ex-cop, and an altogether tougher one – as fans of May’s Lewis novels will know, Fin Macleod has a lot of history on the island, not all of it pretty. Now he’s back, and his teacher son, Fionnlagh, stands charged with murdering a beautiful young activist student with whom he was having an affair.

A tough, uncompromising read and an environmentalist polemic, fast-paced and furious.

Trelawny's Cornwall - Petroc Trelawny

W&N - RRP £24.99

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He grew up on the Lizard and shares his names with a Cornish saint and a pot-smoking vicar-poet of Morwenstow. Now the popular BBC Radio 3 presenter invites us to board the night train for a journey to his beloved, if tourist-blighted, land beyond the Tamar.

An enthralling work, honest, elegiac, rich in social history, erudition, curiosity and memories, shot through with ‘hireth’, an ache of nostalgia..

The winds from further west - Alexander McCall Smith

Birlinn Ltd - RRP £16.99

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Falsely accused of wrongspeak, forced to resign from his teaching job at an Edinburgh medical institute, and doubly betrayed by his girlfriend, Neil retreats to Mull to, well, mull over his future. Can Mr Nice Guy find happiness in a simpler life on the island? And will the kind, comely vet Jill warm to his Hebridean overtures?

Lovely stuff from ‘the world’s favourite author’.

Interpretations of Love - Jane Campbell

Hachette UK - RRP £16.99

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A lonely, fussy old man, Professor Malcolm Miller, attends a small family wedding, carrying a bomb in the form of a letter he should have delivered more than 50 years ago. In bell-clear voices three protagonists tell of the impact on their lives.

A perfectly poised, elegant debut from an octogenarian author who understands her characters better than they understand themselves.

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