So summer starts to draw to a close – darker evenings, chill mornings – even if the sun is managing to catch up by mid morning.

Returning from an idyllic summer in the Cretan sun where blue skies have been so entirely predictable that after a few weeks they were barely noticeable, the adjustment has been considerable.

Yet at the same time couched in a sense that it was time to fit into the groove of home again, of routine.

Yet my own home surroundings will soon be changing. Or rather my house will change.

For although I am making an effort to de-clutter, to head frequently to charity shops and slim down possessions that I barely know I own, I will, of course, be taking the majority with me.

And as soon as books are on the shelves, clothes in cupboards, pictures and photos displayed, my new house will be home. My home. Or rather, as I once heard said about the ownership of houses, I will be its new custodian.

Which takes me conveniently to the importance of houses in fiction.

I am sure I am not the only person who has to possess a clear mental image of protagonists’ homes as I am reading. I imagine where characters are living and take note of any detail an author has offered of colour, shape and dimensions of rooms.

And for my own novels, I draw up a plan of any key house involved -the geography of the place – in estate agent mode. I have to know where my characters cook, sleep, sit etc and visualise them in these settings as I write.

This is no doubt because houses have been catalysts, almost characters in their own right, in my novels. The Legacy of Mr Jarvis and The Odyssey of Lily Page depend upon a house – to propel action, to motivate character. The houses are driving forces. Miller Street SW22 too – well, the title somewhat gives away the importance of the domestic setting.

There are, of course, far more illustrious examples from the canon of English Literature!

E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End comes to mind and the importance of the house is made clear to the reader from the very start:

Dearest Meg,

It isn’t going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful – red brick. We can scarcely pack in as it is …..from hall you go right or left into dining room or drawing room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door into it …..three bedrooms in a row …

And much more. Clearly, this house is going to be far more than a matter of bricks and mortar with symbolic value and Forster is alerting his reader to the fact. Carol Shields, in her novel Unless (one of my all time favourite novels that I constantly re-read) goes into great detail as the first person narrator describes her family’s home which stresses the normality of the domestic circumstances, into which something extraordinary and unexpected has occurred.

Another favourite, contemporary novel is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. Here the house really has to be viewed as a protagonist or at least a catalyst, the mansion, Elkins Park in Pennsylvania playing such an essential role in the narrative. The novel spans several generations of a family who have grown up and lived in the house and for me is one of Patchett’s finest:

But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.

Back to the classics and who can forget the importance of Gateshead and Lowood and Thornfield in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre?

All these places are so crucial to the story and to Jane’s development and their descriptions thus receive great attention. Who can forget the red room at Gateshead? Or the oppressive institution of Lowood school with its appalling physical conditions?

Thornfield Hall, initially a fine, stately and majestic home, described as an agreeable picture and a fine old hall, (albeit with a rather sinister inhabitant in the attic!) receives a forewarning when Jane has a dream that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. When she returns at the end of the novel she does indeed find it is ‘quite a ruin.’

And as for Mr Rochester …? But that’s a consideration for another time.

Because right now, for me, it’s back to clearing out drawers, deep cupboards, investigating the loft where I haven’t ventured for years and generally slimming down those inessential objects that have managed to take up space unnecessarily for ages.

Naturally, though, one thing that I will not be slimming down is my collection of books, my veritable library amassed over decades.

Every one of those slim or substantial volumes will be finding their way into my new house in order to render it a home.

After all, home is where , as someone once wisely said, the heart lies – or at least partially!

Happy reading!