The cold has settled in. The pumpkin spice is wafting into every crevice. The days are getting shorter. The clocks have been turned back. Hallowe’en, with its glitter and gloom, is upon us. It’s time for a warm blanket and a good novel.

1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (From the Fairyland series), by Catherynne M. Valente

If hot chocolate had a literary counterpart, it would be this book. Striking an unsettling balance between the sweet and the dark, it is both hopeful and corrosive to the arteries. A young girl escapes World War Two Nebraska for a world of wyverns and libraries in a coming-of-age story written for adults. Those who enjoyed Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth will find in Fairyland a similar, but gentler, sense of beautiful menace. In its shadows and blurred boundaries, the story seems set in a world of perpetual autumn. And guess what? The heroine is called ‘September’. It can’t get much more season-appropriate than that.

2. The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Modeled after Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, this is a collection of short stories about a boy growing up in a graveyard. The book follows Nobody’s life as he grows from a toddler into a young man, joining him as he learns the rules of humans and how these will govern his experience of love. In a setting dominated by the dark nights and cold breezes of a ghostly homestead, the reader is brought into a world that is as earthly and substantial as his own. In a season where the boundaries between our world and others seem to thin and blur, this book could serve as a lantern of sorts: lighting our way to a deeper understanding of foreignness and the afterlife.

3. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

A combination of prose and old vernacular photographs, this novel is as much a visual as a literary pursuit. It is also a very strange book. Some of the pictures are deeply disquieting, and the tale itself verges on the border of reality and a shadowy afterlife. The young protagonist searches for his grandfather’s past in an abandoned orphanage. He finds a set of children with abnormal abilities, whose lives seem to be suspended in an earlier age. The book is sinister enough for Hallowe’en, and pleasant enough for a cloudy afternoon spent curling up against the radiator. The photographs could provide an interesting source of costume inspiration.

4. The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier

This novel is lit like a forest in October, in fading orange and gold. Chevalier, here, is soft and slow. She draws love stories as if they have already ended. She draws youth with the melancholy of old age. The book is compact: thick and rich. Its words are snugly placed, and its passions tightly wound. The story follows the imagined creator of a series of medieval tapestries in his romantic and sexual travels. It is a very sensual book, but a very lonely one. A bowl of soup at the end of a cold day; it leaves you feeling warm, but mellow, and numb at the edges of your fingers.

5. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, by Max Porter

This is a book that is gently eerie, but warm and full of beauty. It tells the story of a family coping with the sudden loss of a mother and wife. In their London apartment, the two young boys and their father are visited by a crow. The three are in turn guided and antagonised by the visitor into an acceptance of love and loss, and begin to heal. In its bittersweet melting-together of humour and unbearable sadness, this book carries in it the melancholy and nostalgia of autumn.