I’ve been in love with cozy, low-stakes fantasy ever since my mother first handed me a copy of The Hobbit—so for most of my life. I love the focus on place and small comforts, the humble (and often unwilling!) heroes, the slower pace that builds to an emotional crescendo (as well as an action-packed one!), and the way these stories always leave me feeling warm, like I’ve just shared a coffee with a loved one. It should come as no surprise, then, that these are the kinds of stories I love writing best.
The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist is a cozy, coming of age historical fantasy inspired by the story of Beauty and the Beast… with a sapphic twist.
Celeste, a beautiful but disinterested socialite, is determined to travel to the 1867 Paris World Fair to seek an apprenticeship as a naturalist. Nothing can stop her – not the scientific community’s exclusion of women, not her family’s sudden descent into poverty, and certainly not her unexpected engagement. Nothing, that is, except a blizzard, a terrible sense of direction, and the eight-foot-tall mammalian predator following her through the wilds…
I’m a regular D&D player (a dwarf rogue who always fails her stealth checks, to be specific) and this gentle story about an orc barbarian hanging up her sword to open a coffee shop felt like the origin story of a beloved NPC.
Viv is a wonderful character, an adult woman with scars, baggage, and filled with all the fear and hope of trying something new. This may be a fantasy story, but it perfectly portrays the terrifying prospects of changing careers, making new friends, and finding love in your thirties. And my god, will it make you want a cup of coffee and a pastry.
High fantasy, low stakes - with a double-shot of coffee.
After decades of adventuring, Viv the orc barbarian is finally hanging up her sword for good. Now she sets her sights on a new dream - for she plans to open the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. Even though no one there knows what coffee actually is.
If Viv wants to put the past behind her, she can't go it alone. And help might arrive from unexpected quarters. Yet old rivals and new stand in the way of success. And Thune's shady underbelly could make it all…
My family is Welsh, so imagine my delight when, after years of being an avid fan of the exquisite Studio Ghibli film adaptation, I picked up the book and learned that the dazzling (and dazzlingly vain) wizard Howl was a confirmed Welshman, thick accent and all!
But the greatest delight of this whimsical story is in its writing. Only Diana Wynne Jones could imagine a world in which turning a young woman into the ninety-year-old version of herself would be a liberating, romantic act. It’s a story told with such wit, heart, and imagination that it’s become one of my staple comfort reads.
Now an animated movie from Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, the oscar-winning director of Spirited Away
In this beloved modern classic, young Sophie Hatter from the land of Ingary catches the unwelcome attention of the Witch of the Waste and is put under a spell...
Deciding she has nothing more to lose, Sophie makes her way to the moving castle that hovers on the hills above her town, Market Chipping. But the castle belongs to the dreaded Wizard Howl, whose appetite, they say, is satisfied only by the souls of young girls...
There Sophie meets Michael, Howl's apprentice, and Calcifer…
I’ve spent much of my adult life searching for media that gives me the same feeling as sitting down to my favourite Halloween movies as a kid. The gorgeous, autumnal crunch of Hocus Pocus, the spooky-but-not-scary atmosphere of Tim Burton’s 90’s offerings, the magic and adventure of WillowandThe Dark Crystal. It was a big, specific ask, and yet I found it so perfectly in Frances Hardinge.
My favourite of her books (so far) is A Skinful of Shadows. A twisting, turning, spooky adventure about a girl harboring the spirit of an abused circus bear who must save herself, her doofus brother, and said bear from being hollowed out and used as hosts by their horde of ghoulish ancestors. It’s cozy, clever, spectral perfection.
A Skinful of Shadows is a dark YA historical fantasy set in the early part of the English Civil War. Makepeace is an illegitimate daughter of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, and as such, she shares their unique hereditary gift: the capacity to be possessed by ghosts. Reluctant to accept her appointed destiny as vessel for a coterie of her ancestors, she escapes. As she flees the pursuing Fellmottes across war-torn England, she accumulates a motley crew of her own allies, including outcasts, misfits, criminals, and one extremely angry dead bear. From Costa Book of the Year winner Frances Hardinge comes…
The older I get, the more I appreciate fantasy stories with lower, more personal stakes than, for example, saving the world from impending doom. I want the escapism of fantasy and magic grounded in emotions and scenarios I can relate to in some small way.
The Bone Houses is, amongst the walking corpses, the undead goat, the Welsh folklore, and the magic cauldron, a story about a young woman grieving for her father, and a young man searching for family. I found this book when I was still working through the grief of losing my own father—a Welshman and a miner just like the father in the story—and it felt like it had been written just for me.
Seventeen-year-old Aderyn ("Ryn") only cares about two things: her family, and her family's graveyard. And right now, both are in dire straits. Since the death of their parents, Ryn and her siblings have been scraping together a meager existence as gravediggers in the remote Welsh village of Colbren, which sits at the foot of a harsh and deadly mountain range that was once home to fae creatures known as the Otherfolk. The problem with being a gravedigger in Colbren, though, is that the dead don't always stay dead.
The risen corpses are known as "bone houses," and legend says that…
T. Kingfisher has a real skill for writing books about reluctant and unlikely heroes (in this case, a thirty-something-year-old not-very-good nun, an elderly necromancer, a devil-possessed chicken, a failed fairy godmother, an animated dog skeleton, and a very pleasant man) and throwing them into unexpected adventures (rescuing said nun’s sister from her abusive husband, who just so happens to a very important king).
Nettle & Bone combines everything I love about all my other recommendations in one neat, short, standalone package. A perfect book to enjoy with a cup of hot, spiced tea on a brisk morning.
An Instant USA Today & Indie Bestseller An Oprah Daily Top 25 Fantasy Book of 2022 An NPR Best Sci Fi, Fantasy, & Speculative Fiction Book of 2022 A Goodreads Best Fantasy Choice Award Nominee
From Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes an original and subversive fantasy adventure.
*A very special hardcover edition, featuring gold foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*
This isn't the kind of fairytale where the princess marries a prince. It's the one where she kills him.
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse the future, she can never change it.
Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her never told her that the touch of a hand can change everything? When she follows Louis to Glasgow, she begins to learn the limits of his devotion and the complexities of her own affections.
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late-nineteenth-century Scotland
Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but…
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