Written by Henry (the librarian)
September marks the annual festival of Heritage Open Days (from 12-21 September). This is England’s largest festival of history and culture! Libraries have special talks by experts and academics to celebrate Sussex heritage, community and history.
We’ve chosen some fact and fiction inspired by and set in our beautiful Sussex by the Sea! Locations featured include Battle, East Dean, Rye, Newhaven and many more familiar places. So if you fancy reading something a little closer to home, we have some good books to suggest!
Adult fiction
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s much-loved Cazalet Chronicles books are an elegantly written Sussex family saga, taking the reader from the emotional impact of the Great War to the death of the family’s beloved matriarch, via heartaches, intrigue and air raids.
Howard spent her childhood summers in Watlington, Staplecross and Battle and the station, shops, surroundings, are all very recognisable in the details of her settings.
Start with ‘The Light Years’.
Reserve the paperback of The Light Years
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
In 1903, the greatest fictional detective ever retired to East Dean to be a beekeeper.
Nine-year-old Jewish refugee Linus never speaks, his African grey parrot keeps reeling off sequences of German numbers, attracting the interest of the locals. Are they Nazi codes? Swiss bank account numbers? When the parrot vanishes and a man is killed, Holmes agrees to come out of retirement.
Reserve the paperback book of The Final Solution
Borrow The Final Solution e-book on Libby
The Sussex Murder by Ian Sansom
From Beachy Head to Brighton, and from Chichester to Rye, plunge into the dark heart of England.
At about four o’clock on 5th November 1937, Miss Lizzie Walter, a teacher at the King’s Road Primary School in Lewes, said goodbye to her young pupils. The children clattered out into the dark streets, preparing for that night’s revelries – and Miss Lizzie Walter was never seen alive again.
Read by Last of the Summer Wine’s Mike Grady.
Borrow The Sussex Murder audiobook on Libby
Reserve the paperback book of The Sussex Murder
Adult non-fiction
To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing embarks on a weeklong, midsummer odyssey along the banks of the River Ouse, from its source near Haywards Heath to the sea, at Newhaven. More than sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, Laing still finds inspiration and guidance in the author’s abiding presence.
A haunting reflection into how history resides in a landscape – and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.
Reserve the paperback of To the River
Borrow To the River e-book on Libby
The Rising Down by Alexandra Harris
When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home in Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area’s past, including the cottage where William Blake received the poetic spirit of Milton.
Reserve the paperback of The Rising Down
Borrow The Rising Down e-book on Libby
Children’s fiction
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
The most famous and loved racing story of all time. National Velvet is a classic tale of dreams, ambition and one girl’s belief in a horse.
Velvet is a teenager in the late 1920s, living in a small English coastal village in Sussex, dreaming of one day owning many horses. She is a high-strung, shy, nervous child with a delicate stomach. Her mother is a wise, taciturn woman who was once famous for swimming the English Channel; her father is a butcher.
‘My childhood dreams were based on this book – it was the only place I’d ever seen them come true’ Clare Balding
Reserve the paperback of National Velvet
Eerie-on-Sea by Thomas Taylor
Nobody visits Eerie-on-Sea in the winter. Especially not when darkness falls and the wind howls around Maw Rocks and the wreck of the battleship Leviathan, where even now some swear they have seen the unctuous Malamander creep…
When Thomas moved to the East Sussex seaside, he discovered that coastal towns have a strange character of their own in the winter months. When the ice cream kiosks are closed and the bucket-and-spade tourists are gone, darkness and the weather claim the town.
‘Eerie-on-Sea Mysteries’ are a five book series that can be read independently from each other. However, if you prefer to read them in order, start with Malamander.
Borrow the Eerie-on-Sea e-book on Libby
Reserve the paperback of Eerie-on-Sea
Sussex Folk Tales for Children by Xanthe Gresham Knight and Robin Knight
The stories in this collection have slipped on a sunbeam, skidded on the dew and sprinted fast as a fox to be here with you. They tell of Sussex: its sparkling seas; chalk giants and wise witches.
When leaves skitter, it’s Puck, the sprite of Sussex, fighting with his sister the Fairy Queen. When you hear laughter in the forest, it’s Flint, the phantom highwayman making his escape, and when you run over the Downs, you’ll remember they were shaped by the Devil’s buttocks!
Reserve the paperback of Sussex Folk Tales for Children
Borrow the Sussex Folk Tales for Children e-book on Libby
