Shorter Days, Longer Nights

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Shorter Days, Longer Nights

'How did it get so late so soon?  It's night before it's afternoon.'
- Dr Seuss

It's the right time of year to wrap up warm with a brilliant book. Check out our suggested titles for November.

Fiction for the longer nights

The night watch
Neil Lancaster

A lawyer is found dead at sunrise on a lonely clifftop at Dunnet Head on the northernmost tip of Scotland. It was supposed to be his honeymoon, but now his wife will never see him again.

The case is linked to several mysterious deaths, including the murder of the lawyer's last client - Scotland's most notorious criminal - who had just walked free. DS Max Craigie knows this can only mean one thing: they have a vigilante serial killer on their hands.

But this time the killer isn't on the run - he's on the investigation team. And the rules are different when the murderer is this close to home.

Talking at night
Claire Daverley

Will and Rosie meet as teenagers. They're opposites in every way, but over secret walks home and late-night phone calls they become closer, destined to be one another's great love story.

Until, one day, tragedy strikes and any possibility of them being together shatters. But that tragedy - and their history - is what will connect them forever.

Murder in autumn
Lesley Cookman

Libby Sarjeant is proudly hosting an original production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Oast Theatre, which features a daring twist on the classic play.

But an old acquaintance of Libby’s - irascible director Constance Matthews - is outraged by the show, stirring strong feelings throughout Steeple Martin.

When a body is subsequently found in the woodlands of a grand estate, the community is shocked by the prospect of murder - but the case is far from straightforward, with dark secrets lurking beneath the surface.

Music in the dark
Sally Magnusson

1884. Jamesina Ross is long finished with men. But one night a stranger seeking lodgings knocks on the door of her tenement flat. He doesn't recognise her, but she remembers him at once. Not that she plans to mention it. She has no intention of trusting anyone enough to let herself be vulnerable again.

A lifetime ago, Jamesina made up songs about the Highland glen where she lived and the kin who had worked that land for generations. When her community was threatened with eviction, she gave voice to that too, and the women stood together, defiant and determined. But Jamesina's music was no match for one of the most brutal confrontations of the Highland Clearances.

Jamesina has borne the disfigurements of that day ever since, on her face and inside her head. It marked the end of a life of promise and the beginning of a very different one. Her lodger thinks that if she would only dare to open the past, she might have the chance of a future.

The lodger
Helen Scarlett

London in 1919 was a city of ghosts and absences, haunted by the men who marched away but never came back from 'the war to end all wars'.

Grace Armstrong believes that she has come to terms with her own loss, the death of her brilliant and dazzling fiancé - but he starts to reappear both in her waking life and dreams.

When a body is dragged from the Thames and identified as Grace's family's long term lodger who suddenly disappeared, Grace feels compelled to find out what happened.

In doing so she is drawn reluctantly into the sordid and dangerous underbelly of London and a scandal that rocked Edwardian society.

Thrills and chills

The night house
Jo Nesbo

In the wake of his parents' tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne.

Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance.

No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate.

He traces the number that Tom prank called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Black Mirror Wood. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear.

A haunting in the Arctic
C. J. Cooke

1901. Dundee, Scotland. Nicky wakes on board The Ormen, a whaling ship, attacked and dragged there, held against her will. With land still weeks away, it's just her, the freezing ocean, and the crew - and they're all owed something only she can give them.

Now. Skumaskot, Iceland. The Ormen has been drifting across the oceans for decades, its crew inexplicably vanished, it's stories still unknown.
Urban explorer Dominique has battled to reach Skumaskot, an old shark fishing village on the northern tip of Iceland. A place where no one has lived for over forty years.

And the resting place of The Ormen. She thought it was deserted. But something is there with her. And it's seeking revenge.

Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier

Working as a lady's companion, our heroine learns her place - and life looks bleak until she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise.

When she accepts, she's whisked from glamorous Monte Carle to the ominous and brooding Manderley, where the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man.

The memory of his dead wife, Rebecca, reverberates around the property, forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers.

Did you know that if the book you want isn't in the library, you can place a hold and we will reserve it for you?  

Not placed a hold before?  Not sure how to get started?  
Check out our simple guide to placing holds at the bottom of this e-mail!

Ready for more riveting reads?

Check out the full 'Shorter days and longer nights' book list, carefully selected and curated by our friendly staff.

Baking, birds, and beautiful berries

The Nordic baker
Sofia Nordgren

Sofia Nordgren guides you through a year of plant-based Nordic cakes, buns, breads, cookies and crackers; keep things simple, go back to basics and cook with nature in mind.

From thumbprint cookies, Kladdkaka and rhubarb galette in springtime, raspberry and cardamom cupcakes when the weather begins to warm up, and a midsommar cake for summer celebrations, through to lingonberry roll cake, pear tart and cardamom rolls for cosy autumn nights and gingerbread bundt cake, saffron buns and semlor for snowy winter days.

The book of the barn owl
Sally Coulthard

With its heart-shaped face and silent, graceful flight, the barn owl regularly tops the nation's list of favourite birds.

A brief sighting is a thrill, hovering along a hedgerow or sweeping over a stubble field, but how much do we really know about this sublime tenant of the night?

We often feel we see ourselves in the barn owl's big, baby eyes and quizzical tilt of the head. But the barn owl lives on a different plane - a yearly see-saw of feast and famine, companionship and solitude. It's a tough life - living in the shadows - but the barn owl has made it this far.

RHS: the winter garden
Naomi Slade

Unlock your garden's winter potential and see the beauty and promise of the colder months with award-winning garden designer and author, Naomi Slade.

There is so much to marvel at in a winter garden. The winter season brings new delights to draw us outside, from the dusting of frost on bare seedheads and the long-reaching shadows cast by a December dawn to the joy of huddling up beside a fire pit to see in the New Year.

This book is a celebration of the coldest season, with photography that captures the very best that winter has to offer.

New Books Coming Soon

Take a scroll through our upcoming releases and bestsellers - all available to order.

Autumnal animals

Foxlight
Katya Balen

Fen and Rey were found curled up small and tight at the very edge of the wildlands. They are twin sisters. Different and the same. Separate and connected. They will always have each other, even if they don't have a mother and don't know their beginning. But they do want answers to who their mother is and where she might be; what their story is and how it began.

So when a fox appears late one night at the house, Fen and Rey see it as a sign - it's here to lead them to their truth, find their real family and fill the missing piece they have felt since they were born.

But the wildlands are exactly that: wild.

Ready, steady squirrel
Nicola Kinnear

It's winter in the forest: time for squirrels to gather all the nuts and acorns and pine cones they'd squirrelled away in the autumn.

Evie's determined she can do it all by herself. She's ready. She's steady. She's going squirrelling! But it's a huge task. Can she really do it all on her own? Or should she let her friends lend a hand?

Nicola Kinnear's illustrations are her best ever, in this endearing story about courage and kindness.

Everything you need to know about holds:
how to reserve a book

When you're looking for a specific book, it can be disappointing when it's not on the shelf at your local library.  Not to worry - our easy-to-use holds system has you covered.

• When you place a hold on a book, if we have a copy on the shelf at another of our libraries, we'll send it over to your local library for you to collect.
• If all of our copies are on loan, you will join a queue and when it's your turn, we'll send a copy over to your local library for you to collect.
• You'll receive an e-mail when your hold is ready to collect, and you have 13 days after the hold arrives to collect it.
• Holds are free for children, and a small charge is made for adults.  
• You can place up to 20 holds on your library account.
• You can place holds online - all you need is your library card number and password.
• Alternatively, our friendly staff are always happy to place holds for you.
  You can ask in the library, or e-mail us with your request at: libraries@cheshiresharedservices.gov.uk

We hope to see you soon

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