The best books that make you feel like you’re living inside their folklore

I read this book when my mind needs a holiday from the mundane world, and it always restores me. Blood-edged and sharp-toothed, it’s a collection of retold fairy tales written with passionate vividness, dry humour, and pure poetic sensuality. Carter brings a modern eye to Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, and the rest, but her tellings feel almost primal: there’s a tangibility to them, a scent that comes off the page, and her play with language feels like she’s drawing you into a wicked conspiracy with her. I adore this book! 

There are some books you just need. Before I’d even finished my library copy, I’d gone and bought my own; otherwise I couldn’t have given it back. On the face of it, this is nature writing; MacDonald weaves an account of her relationship with a pet goshawk into the story of T.H. White and his own writing of The Goshawk before his King Arthur stories made him famous. It’s a place, this book: a landscape, a psychology, and a sensitive, compassionate history. MacDonald reaches deep into our past – not just the Arthurian lore, but the mythology of animals and how we use them to find our humanity. Tender, honest, and profoundly beautiful.  

From the first feat of magic, where stone grinds over stone, whispering with life, you know you’re somewhere special. Clarke brings a warm amusement to the tale of scholarly magicians dealing with disastrous fairies, who are filled with magic but not, unfortunately, with kindness or reason. There are many ways to do fairies, and Clarke’s is both funny and dangerous. An influence on my book was living with a neurodivergent family, and it feels like Jonathan Strange picks up on narcissism. I’d be fibbing if I said she wasn’t a big influence – mostly because she expanded the horizons, showing just how wild and witty you can be. Her world is huge, wonderful, and astonishingly real. 

Oh, I cried my eyes out over this book when I was a kid! It’s a tale of Arthurian Britain, but somehow it reads, more than any other I’ve seen, like a historical novel – less T.H. White than Rosemary Sutcliffe. Bradshaw grounds it deeply in Welsh rather than French culture, and the magic feels eerily normal – terrifying, but also just part of the weave of the world. Add to this characters you get truly attached to, and it’s bewitching in the best sense; the book lingers in my imagination like a place I once lived when I was a child – and imaginatively, that’s what it is. 

I still cherish the fragile old blue hardback my father gave me (or possibly let me half-inch), introducing me to James’s magic. James is the only writer who’s actually scared me – and for ghosts, that’s the true measure of a world that’s got you in its claws. James begins by heaping up the mundane details of scholarship and genteel tourism, sometimes to the point where he’s mischievously playing with your patience – so when the horror touches its teeth to the protagonist, you almost feel the bite in your own skin. His old world is now pretty exotic to a modern reader, but somehow that just adds to the atmosphere: everything feels as real as everything else, to the point where it makes me nervous about my own real world!