Stardust

Sophie is turned into an old woman by a witch, shrugs, and goes to keep house for a vain, slippery wizard whose castle clanks across the moors on chicken legs. It's all bickering, doors that open onto four different places, and a fire demon who does the cooking. Read it when you want to be looked after and gently teased.

A man returns to the Sussex lane where he grew up and remembers the year he was seven, when something old and hungry came through, and the girl down the road said her duck pond was an ocean. Small, frightening, and aching with how big the world feels when you're little. Read it when you want to be unsettled and tucked in at once.

Every ten years the wizard takes a girl from the valley, and this time, to everyone's surprise, he takes Agnieszka — clumsy, perpetually grubby, and quietly furious about it. The magic here smells of woodsmoke and turned earth, and the corrupted Wood at the valley's edge is genuinely creeping. Read it when you want a fairy tale with mud under its nails.