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AT THE close of the News At Ten last Wednesday, a weatherman enthused geekily about ‘just how quickly it’s going dark’. Steady on, I thought, as he explained that in London we have been losing three minutes and 50 seconds of light daily, while in Lerwick, Shetland, a sobering five and half minutes.

The summer of record-breaking heat and drought is well and truly over. But I am still resisting tights and jumpers: in the South, at least, temperatures remain mild.

There is, though, that back-toschool, bittersweet pull: one of summer’s end, but also new terms and projects. Novels capture that atmosphere eloquently. Elizabeth Strout’s Booker-shortlisted Oh William! takes two characters in their autumn years, widowed novelist Lucy Barton and her first husband William, and sends them to Maine together. The weather is ‘warm, but not too warm’, rather like Lucy’s feelings for William, which veer between fondness and exasperation.

John Williams’s poignant Stoner is one of the saddest novels I have read. Stoner is an English professor at the University of Missouri. His marriage is disastrous, but he does, briefly, find romantic happiness elsewhere: ‘The fall semester began that September in an intensely colourful Indian summer that came after an early frost. Stoner returned to his classes with an eagerness that he had not felt for a long time . . .’

The eagerness to return to one’s life as autumn gets under way is captured in Leigh Bardugo’s The Disappearance, the concluding story in Marple, a new collection of 12 short stories by contemporary writers all featuring Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth, Miss Marple.

Bardugo’s story begins in London, where Miss Marple, having spent several weeks at her nephew Raymond’s chilly ‘fashionable flat’, is hankering for her own cosy cottage home. When her friend summons her back to St Mary Mead to solve a mystery, she is not disappointed.

Throw yourself into autumn projects — but also indulge in the last of any autumnal sun. We’re all expecting a harder winter.