Whimsy & Folklore

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.

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.

A moneylender's daughter is too good at turning silver into gold — so the cold king of the winter folk comes to claim her for it. Three women, told in turn, scheme their way through a frozen Lithuania of ledgers, debts and bargains that bite. Read it deep in January, with the heating on and the dark pressing at the window.

In a frozen corner of medieval Russia, a wild-hearted girl can still see the little household spirits everyone else has stopped feeding — and something in the forest is waking now they've been forgotten. It's all long winters, woodsmoke, honey cakes and old gods at the threshold. Read it under a blanket while the frost does its work outside.