Missionaries, revolutionaries and hacks abound in the best books to reread this autumn: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (Penguin Classics £9.99, 224pp)

It’s the 1840s and Father Latour (the eponymous Archbishop) and Father Joseph have been instructed by the Pope to ‘reawaken the faith’ in the New World. They travel on muleback through canyons peppered with ruins of once great Indian civilisations, encountering Mexicans, lecherous priests and Navajo warriors along the way.

Latour is almost cartoonishly saintly and this sometimes-grating piety is fabulously offset by his irascible sidekick Joseph – who’s almost more cowboy than priest.

It’s a sugar-coated depiction of the Catholic mission, but when writing is this good, who cares? All the frictions of frontier life are gloriously illuminated. This simple story of two missionaries is the perfect depiction of how terrifying and tremendous life was for those who lived at the edge of the world.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics £8.99, 544pp)

Long before Netflix, The Traitors or EastEnders there was Dickens. His novels were published in weekly serials with nail-biting cliffhangers. When Dickens turned his attention to the French revolution, he amalgamated narrative genius with one of the most dramatic events of modern history; the result is his best novel.

Charles Darnay is our goodie, a French aristocrat who has renounced his inheritance and set up a happy life in London after witnessing the horrors of the elitist system his uncle (the evil Marquis De St Evremonde) so gleefully upholds.

The Marquis is murdered, and the revolution soon turns France into a hellscape of bodies strung up on lampposts and that inexhaustible guillotine. Darnay returns to Paris and finds himself in the clutches of those eager for his aristocratic head.

In balancing the brutality of the aristocrats and the viciousness of the revolutionaries, Dickens leaves readers undecided as to who exactly the enemy is.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics £10.99, 336pp)

Of all the ‘comedies’ in Waugh’s rich and witty oeuvre, Scoop is the funniest.

Lord Copper, owner of the Daily Beast, believes a ‘promising little war’ is hotting up in Ishmaelia (a fictional East African state) and wants to send the best man to cover it. Who better than the chicest novelist of the age, John Courteney Boot. The only problem is they mistakenly ask his mild-mannered, bucolic cousin William Boot.

He is persuaded to accept when he hears just how lucrative the expense account will be. Ishmaelia is crawling with journalists who know how to conjure a sensational story from nothing, eventually resulting in William sending the Beast the scoop of the decade (albeit a slightly fictional one).

Many have tried to write about the absurdities of journalism, yet nearly 90 years on, Waugh is the only one to have succeeded.