As we head into autumn, the days are growing gloomy and the nights are drawing in.

If your next six months are set to involve cosy nights in by the fire and a good book, we have just the thing for you. Here’s your guide to seven recent and classic long reads guaranteed to keep you engrossed until winter.

And in some cases, maybe even until spring.

1. The Makioka Sisters, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Born in Tokyo in 1886, Tanizaki completed over twenty literary works before his death in 1965. The most influential, and arguably the most popular, is his 1948 masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters.

Published in Japan with a title that literally translates as A Light Snowfall, this novel in three parts tells the story of an upper-class Osaka family during the years leading up to the Second World War.

As with many of Tanizaki’s works, the novel explores the juxtaposition of Eastern traditions and modern Westernisation. Here, the conflict is symbolised in the relationship between the sophisticated and wilful youngest sister, Taeko, and her thirty-year-old, unmarried sister, Yukiko.

From the main Osaka residence, eldest sister Tsuruko attempts to find a suitable match for Yukiko even as the family’s former good name continues to decline. As each successive match fails, Taeko becomes increasingly desperate to see her elder sister married, at which point she will be free to reveal her lover to the world.

2. A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, James’s violent epic spans three decades, two continents, and a huge cast of characters.

The starting point is the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Bob Marley on 3 December 1976. The attack comes just two nights before he is due to perform at a concert intended to quell recent violence. Shot, along with his wife, his manager, and two others, Marley, and the rest of the intended victims, all survive.

Through the lives of slum kids, drug lords, CIA operatives, and music journalists, James gives us a no-holds-barred portrait of a late-twentieth-century society ravaged by tragedy.

Visceral, moving, and not for the faint-hearted, it’s a story told in shocking, lyrical, and award-winning style.

3. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Another winner of the Man Booker prize, this time in 2013, Catton’s 800-page mystery is set in her native New Zealand.

In 1866, at the height of the gold rush, Walter Moody stumbles across a mystery involving the disappearance of a wealthy local man, an attempted suicide, and an unclaimed fortune.

A modern twist on the nineteenth-century page-turner, The Luminaries incorporates a complex central mystery, period dialogue, and an ambitious plot to create a vivid and compelling mystery.

4. The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz

Originally released as three separate novels, Nobel Prize for Literature winner Mahfouz’s epic has since been collected into one volume, as the author originally intended.

The story spans three generations of a single Muslim family through the early decades of the twentieth century. In the colonial Egypt of the early 1900s, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad’s family live in fear of his strict rule but will slowly adapt to the changing world around them, each going their resolutely separate ways.

The family’s tribulations play out against the backdrop of two World Wars and a society on the brink of change. It is a sprawling family saga filled with moments of humour, sadness, and joy.

5. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Clarke’s 2005 debut novel – and former Time magazine Book of the Year – is a 1,000-page epic of an alternative nineteenth-century England.

When a powerful and gaudy display of magic interrupts a battle of the Napoleonic Wars, its originator, Mr Norrell, becomes a celebrity overnight. He takes another young magician, Jonathan Strange, under his wing but as Strange becomes increasingly drawn to the wilder, darker elements of the field, the two are destined to become fierce rivals.

Written as a historical, factual account of English magic (complete with footnotes), it’s a fascinating mix of history and fantasy, by turns funny and moving.

Its unhurried pace, brooding atmosphere, and disquieting menace mean that it will stay with you long after you’ve closed its pages for the night.

6. A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell

Although each book in the 12-novel ‘cycle’ that comprises Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time clocks in at around two to three hundred pages, they should really only be read together, and in order.

Compiled into four omnibus editions (or ‘movements’) subtitled Spring, Autumn, Summer, and Winter, the stories follow narrator Nicholas Jenkins from a boarding school in the 1920s, through army life and the London Blitz, to post-War Venice and beyond.

Volume one introduces readers to aspiring writer Jenkins, his friends Stringham and Templar, as well as the soon-to-become omnipresent, Kenneth Widmerpool.

This masterwork of English fiction is a stunning chronicle of politics, business, and society in twentieth-century Britain.

With more than 300 characters and just under 3,000 pages, the full novel cycle is sure to keep you engrossed well into autumn.

7. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust

The final novel on our list – a single narrative despite its six volumes and massive page-count – is the masterpiece of arguably the greatest novelist of the twentieth century.

Through more than 4,200 pages, Proust takes us on a journey into the past and into memory.

We follow our narrator from his early years at Combray, as a sensitive young boy waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight, to the first glimpse of the great love of his life. As well as chronicling the torment of jealousy and insecurity that love unleashes, we witness his rise through Parisian high society.

Art, politics, romantic jealousy, obsession, and grief – the novel is a meditation on all of these and more.