The Bear and the Nightingale

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 boy crosses the wall at the edge of his sleepy English village to fetch a fallen star for a girl, and finds the star is a furious woman with a broken leg. What follows is a proper fairy tale — witches, ghostly princes, a market that appears once every nine years. Read it on a night when you want enchantment with a sharp, knowing wink.

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.