Spring reading guide

30 books for the season of renewal

Spring! Just last year, I wrote about my complicated relationship with this season, which forces us out of hiding and into the open. I lamented the sudden downpours and constant need to add or remove layers, as well as the social anxiety which came with a refilling calendar.

However, I finished last spring somewhat reconciled to the season, and this year I’m ready to embrace it from the off. I can admit, now, that it’s a time of year ripe with opportunity and hope.

A manual I used to get me through last year, which delivered in spades, brings me to my first recommendation. Spring by Michael Morpurgo is part memoir, part almanac, tracing the season as it evolves through the lens of life on his Dartmoor farm. It’s so beautifully written and makes for a gorgeous gift.

As always, this deeply seasonal reader has sorted her recommendations according to the different associations this season carries and then left a big old index of 30 books at the end of the post to keep you going until summer.

Please share your own recommendations for spring reads in the comments!

---

English pastoral

Morpurgo brings me nicely to my first section of recommended reading: the English pastoral. Britain is perhaps better suited to spring than any other season – our lands really are green and pleasant, thanks to those pesky downpours, and nothing says spring quite like a frolicking lamb. Naturally, we need to look to the classics first.

I read my first ever Thomas Hardy last month with Far From the Madding Crowd. I absolutely adored it, and the 2015 screen adaptation. One of the main characters, the lovely Gabriel Oak, is a shepherd and the novel is filled to the rafters with SHEEP. As well as being a love story, Far From the Madding Crowd offers a gorgeous portrait of England in all its glory while dealing with the harsh realities of a livelihood that relies on the caprices of Mother Nature.

“It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season – the vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the complest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations [...] there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-altogether.”

Far From the Madding Crowd

In fact, I’ve come to accept that my very favourite classics blend tales of exhilaratingly ordinary lives with evocative rural settings. For that reason, Middlemarch (in my opinion the greatest English novel), belongs here, as does Austen’s Emma. Not for me the ballrooms of Bath, but rather the meet-cutes of the footpath and country cottages crawling with roses.

While we’re in the country house realm, we must talk about Graham Swift’s masterpiece Mothering Sunday. This exquisite novel is set over the course of a single day – Mothering Sunday, of course — and explores the romantic entanglement of the housemaid of one manor and the gentleman heir of another, building to a shocking climax. I love how Swift places us right inside that narrow timeframe, so much so we vividly sense everything from the blossoming trees to the impending tragedy.

The pastoral has recently come to the fore in memoir, too. At the time of writing, I have finally dipped into H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, the story of a young professional who falls apart upon her father’s death and finds solace in her childhood passion for falconry, training her own Goshawk – Mabel. This one’s back in the national conversation at the moment due to the new film featuring the indomitable Claire Foy. Is it just me who feels like I’m permanently chasing my tail trying to keep up with new adaptations?

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

The second memoir on my to-read list is Raising Hare from Chloe Dalton, which documents her experience of escaping the city during lockdown only to rescue and befriend an injured hare.

If you happen, like me, to be something of a weather nerd, then I have an especially niche recommendation for you. Spring is fabulous for weather enthusiasts, with its spells of deceiving sunshine, dramatic hailstorms and sudden floods. The Secret World of Weather comes from Tristan Gooley, author of The Natural Navigator. It teaches you, in simple language, how to spot signs in the landscape that indicate incoming weather patterns, from the behaviour of wildlife to cloud clusters.

---

The great escape

As longer days turn our minds to the heady adventure of road trips, what could be more fitting for spring than The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s immersive novel about a Butler’s reckoning with love, regrets and the meaning of life behind the steering wheel of his employer’s Ford?

If you prefer to make your escape by water, then I heartily recommend Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. This slim novel charts the highs and lows of three friends — Dickensian bank clerk type characters — seeking a change of scene by boating on the Thames. It’s laugh-out-loud funny.

In case you hadn’t realised yet, I love Britain and all it has to offer — especially during spring. But we all start to get itchy feet around this time of year, too, when yet another downpour has us dreaming of Tuscan hills and Spanish courtyards.

A few years ago I felt very smug when, invited to a wedding in Tuscany, I timed the trip with reading A Room with a View by E.M Forster. The beloved novel is a coming-of-age story following young Lucy staying in a pensione in Florence with her older aunt. There she meets a young man, but back at home in Surrey she has other romantic obligations.

Secondly, and I have to say this is my favourite of the two, is the wonderful The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Antrim. Written in the 1920s, this novel follows four unsatisfied women of vastly different character and age who all converge on an Italian castle for a holiday. Hugely entertaining, it’s a story that reaffirms the notion that more unites us than divides us. This book fuels my bucket list desire to go on some sort of retreat without anyone I know and see what I find out about myself and life.

Departing from Italy, we head for the parched island of Sicily and the fictional Bohemia with The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. Despite the title, this is absolutely a springtime read. We have shepherds again, and beautiful descriptions of life in both the real and imagined locations. I especially love the romance of Perdita and Florizel, which comes to life amidst the pastoral hills of Bohemia and gives rise to some of the most beautiful speeches I’ve read in literature.

“All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.”

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

New beginnings

If spring opens up some difficult feelings for you, then these are the books I’d press into your hands. These recommendations deal with new beginnings, whether in the form of young people course-correcting or older characters coming to terms with retirement. They often begin by giving the reader something of a sorry picture, only to flood the narrative with joy in the form of a fresh start.

Our first stop is Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. I read this many, many moons ago and still remember its sheer originality. Against a backdrop of trauma-driven alcoholism, Eleanor becomes fixated on a celebrity as a form of control. As this fixation reaches its climax and Eleanor becomes increasingly detached from reality, it’s a far more mundane sort of love that sets her on path back to herself.

Next up is Bobby Palmer’s Small Hours. This one could have ended up in the pastoral section, what with the talking fox, but it’s also a powerful story of reclaiming your own narrative. Palmer, who authored Isaac and The Egg, is a master of magical realism and uses the blurred lines of the genre to explore the fractures of a family as they find their way back to one another. I love how this novel portrays the sort of disillusionment that can set in in your late twenties, particularly when you’re working a job that’s detached from your sense of self.

“Things aren’t set in stone. The smallest creatures undergo the greatest transformations. We are all of us, always, in flux.”

Small Hours by Bobby Palmer

For something a little lighter, another brilliant Japanese novel is What You Are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. Very much in the ‘cats and books’ Japanese sub-genre I adore, this one follows multiple characters as they visit their local library. The godmother-esque librarian subtly unpacks what’s really troubling each individual, and recommends a book or club that can help them find a resolution. It sounds fanciful, but for us readers the notion of salvation through books is a wholly real premise.

Lastly, it was refreshing to find a contemporary romance which places the landscape front and centre as David Nicholls’ You Are Here does. Romance doesn’t even make it into my top three genres, but every so often something really glorious comes along. This novel blends unassuming main characters approaching midlife with an epic walk across England. In unforgiving conditions and amidst the rhythm of marching along day in, day out, something truly special blooms.

My own new beginnings pick for this year will be Greengates by RC Sheriff. If you know Sheriff at all, it’s likely for his beloved but understated novel The Fortnight in September, which follows a nuclear family on their annual holiday in Bognor Regis. Greengates, on the other hand, tells the story of a couple coming to terms with retirement and how a move to the countryside proves to give them the mindset change they need. I’m hoping it’s as life-affirming and compulsively readable as Fortnight.

---

The Wind in the Willows, original illustrated edition

Whimsy and childlike delight

I find I often return to children’s books at Christmastime, but there are some equally strong recommendations for spring. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee is not a children’s book, per se, but it is about childhood — in particular, that of the author growing up in the beautiful Slad Valley in the Cotswolds, not far from me. Although the Lees live on the brink of poverty and have little shelter from the harsh seasons, Cider with Rosie looks back fondly on a childhood lived primarily outdoors. Lee is easily one of my all-time favourite authors, and his memories soar off the page to roost in your imagination.

Of course, spring may have you reaching for children’s classics like The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables. I grew up with The Wind in the Willows and even played Mole in a school play, so I’m more than familiar with the antics of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad — chiefly, ‘messing about in boats.’ I had a sailor for a grandfather, and that quote alongside an illustration of the creatures hung in my grandparents’ house for the duration of my childhood. As for The Secret Garden, I still remember how that book taught me empathy as a girl.

It wouldn’t be a spring reading guide without a nod to the shire. I’m a huge Tolkien fan, but have always favoured The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring over the latter two books due to the whimsical descriptions of Bag End with its Hobbit hollows and abundant wildlife. Even at the very end, when the shire has been destroyed by war, the rejuvenation project — spearheaded with loving dedication by Samwise Gamgee — just feels like spring.

“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like?”

“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…”

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

A final word in this category is for the books which inspired the iconic Studio Ghibli films Howl’s Moving Castle and The Castle in the Air. I confess that, while I’m a huge fan of the films, I’ve never read the books by British author Diana Wynne Jones, which were published in the late 1980s. These stories place vivid landscapes at their centre, tapping into our childlike imaginations with descriptions of rolling meadows and blooming jungles set alongside castles flying through the air or perching on lofty clouds.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2024)

---

So there you have it; my sprawling and eclectic spring reading guide. I hope you found something for you in here and please do share your favourites in the comments, whether I’ve mentioned them or not. You can check in on what I’m reading on Instagram at lit_with_lyds.

---

Index

• The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Antrim

• What you are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

• Emma by Jane Austen

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer

• Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• A Room with a View by EM. Forster

• The Secret World of Weather by Tristan Gooley

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

• The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

• Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

• Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Montgomery

• You Are Here by David Nicholls

• Small Hours by Bobby Palmer

• The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare

• Greengates by RC. Sherriff

• Spring by Ali Smith

• Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

• The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien

• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien

• The Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones

• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones