Autumn Cosy Reads

A gifted, arrogant boy summons something he shouldn't, then spends the book sailing a grey northern sea to face it. Le Guin writes magic as the true names of things, which makes everything feel weighed and quiet. Read it when you want fantasy that treats you like a grown-up.

A respectable hobbit who'd rather be having a second breakfast gets bundled out the door by thirteen dwarves and a meddling wizard. It's all riddles in the dark, songs round the fire, and a longing for home that only grows the further you go. Read it when the nights draw in.

A unicorn leaves her wood to find out whether she's truly the last, and falls in with a second-rate magician and a weary woman along the way. It's funny and sad in the same breath, written like a fairy tale that knows it's a fairy tale. Read it when you want something beautiful that aches a little.

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.