Autumn…the season of crunchy leaves or ghostly spirits?

With the days getting shorter and the weather turning colder, how do you feel about the arrival of autumn?

For writer Kate Mosse, best known for the blockbuster historical novel Labyrinth, autumn is her favourite season. Like Anne of Green Gables, she particularly rejoices that ‘I live in a world where there are Octobers’, her favourite month of all, when she can revel in ‘the texture of leaf and mulch, the sight of leaves changing colour on the trees, the crack of twigs underfoot’.

Intertwined with her love of autumn is Mosse’s passionate attachment to Sussex, where she has lived for all but 15 of her 65 years. Mosse uses her walks across the county to map out the first draft of her books in her head.

Her novels often contain elements of ghost stories and gothic fiction, so it’s no surprise that she loves Halloween – not the modern American version but the age-old traditions that go with the eve of All Hallows.

In Celtic times it was believed that the cusp of October and November was the time when natural laws were suspended and ‘ghosts, spirits and devils might walk’. The folklore surrounding Halloween, she reflects, is our way of acknowledging even today that there are older and deeper mysteries than our minds can grasp.

Mosse also loves another of autumn’s big events, Bonfire Night. Since the 1820s, the East Sussex town of Lewes has marked November 5 in style and it now holds the world’s largest Guy Fawkes event, attracting as many as 40,000 people. Going to the event for the first time, Mosse concludes the whole spectacle is ‘uniquely and weirdly English’.

This is the third in a series of short books on the seasons by well-known authors, such as Michael Morpurgo and Val McDermid, and Kate Mosse is a persuasive advocate for the joys of autumn. Her advice is to immerse yourself in the season and ‘remember to marvel at the world around us’.