Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde is a folklorist with the bedside manner of a closed door: brilliant, prickly, far happier with her footnotes than with people. The book is her field diary — entries, annotations and the occasional waspish cross-reference — kept through a hard winter in a remote northern village, where she has come to finish her great encyclopaedia of faeries and finds the local Folk rather more present than the literature allowed.
It is cosy academia with teeth. The pleasure is in watching magic treated as a proper subject for study — the careful notes, the fieldwork, the changeling lore — while a beautiful face turns out to hide sharp teeth and a fairy king takes an interest. And yes, it is a slow burn: her infuriatingly charming academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, turns up to be useless and lovely in roughly equal measure, the romance kept low and playful while the folklore holds centre stage.
If you've turned the last page and want to stay in that snowbound, scholarly, faintly dangerous mood — whether you're after the same dry-witted heroine, the diary-and-footnotes structure, or simply more cosy-but-eerie fae — here's where we'd send you next. (And if you've not yet read on in the series, that's waiting too; more on that below.)
The one you loved
FolkloreAcademia
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries
A brilliant, gloriously antisocial scholar arrives in a frozen northern village to catalogue its faeries, and records it all in field notes that grow steadily warmer despite herself. Snowdrifts, folklore that bites, and an infuriating academic rival who keeps turning up. Read it when you want woodsmoke, cleverness and a slow thaw.
If you loved Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, try these
The nearest thing on our shelves to Emily's own register: two feuding magicians, an eerie faerie 'gentleman', and a magic delivered through footnotes so copious they crowd the page. Scholarship and the uncanny in the same breath.
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If it was the diary-as-fieldwork you loved most — a gentle, meticulous narrator mapping an inexplicable world one journal entry at a time — this is the same quietly enchanted, slightly lonely keeping of notes, in far fewer pages.
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Emily's snowbound folklore transplanted to a Russian winter: a wild girl who keeps faith with the old household spirits while the cold and the Folk press at the door. Respect the old ways here, or pay for forgetting them.
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Another clever woman striking a hard bargain with the inhuman fae — here the icy Staryk — across a frozen landscape. The cold-magic and the steel-spined heroine will feel like coming home to Ljosland.
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For the grumpy-magician dynamic above all: a village girl bound to an irritable, impossible wizard, set against a malevolent Wood thick with Slavic folklore. The banter is sharper than Emily's, the forest hungrier.
On our shelves →
A bookish heroine raised among magic and a prickly sorcerer whose sparring slowly catches light — the same blend of libraries, scholarship and slow-burn exasperation that warms Emily and Bambleby.
On our shelves →
The cosier, more mannered end of Emily's fae-meets-society charm: changelings, curses and faerie bargains threaded through a Regency season, with a kind, unhurried romance and no sharp edges left lying about.
On our shelves →Not on our shelves yet, but the read-alike everyone reaches for: academia, deadly field research and a rivalry that warms into romance — even the 'field guide' framing rhymes with Emily's encyclopaedia.
Also off our shelves, in a chillier, moodier key: dark-academia atmosphere, an academic rivalry, and a line between the rational and the faerie-uncanny that keeps quietly blurring.
Good questions
If you haven't yet, read on in Emily's own series. After that, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the closest match for the scholarly-magic-and-footnotes feeling, and The Bear and the Nightingale for the snowbound folklore. Reach for Piranesi if it was the diary-keeping you loved most.
Yes — it's the first of a series. Heather Fawcett continues Emily's adventures in Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands, and again in Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales, so there's plenty more field research waiting once you've finished this one.
Cosy, but with a draught under the door. It has the warmth — a snug northern village, dry humour, a slow-building romance — yet the Folk are genuinely uncanny and the fieldwork can turn deadly without warning. Cosy-but-eerie is its sweet spot.
It is, but gently. The romance with Wendell Bambleby is kept low and playful — grumpy meets charming, opposites attracting at a scholar's pace — while the folklore and the faerie world hold centre stage. Come for the encyclopaedia, stay for the bickering.
For the scholarly, footnoted magic, Susanna Clarke. For clever women set against the winter fae, Naomi Novik. For prickly magicians and bookish heroines, Margaret Rogerson and Olivia Atwater. And Katherine Arden for the snowbound folklore.
Whimsy & Folklore →Strange & Beautiful → ← More read-alikes Browse every book →