Fiction: The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke

Author of The Lighthouse Witches and The Nesting, CJ Cooke creates pitch perfect eerie reads. Her unnerving gothic tales of folklore and the unexplained have that curious habit of sliding beneath your skin and prickling uneasily up your neck.

Set in the early 1960s, The Ghost Woods tells of a remote Scottish house for unmarried mothers, rumours of a fairy curse, unexplained happenings in the woods and a strange little boy who knows more than he should.

Pearl Gotham, twenty two, unmarried and pregnant, has been sent to Lichen Hall – an old Manor House in the woods – to have her child and give it up for adoption. But the Whitlock family who own the hall seem erratic; half the house is shut up, an invasion of mushrooms and drifting spores behind the locked doors; and the other girls at the house have secrets.

Drawing together the resilience of fungi, mysterious maladies, the otherworldliness of pregnancy and buried trauma, this has hints of body horror, queer identity and a touch of the supernatural. Read, with a creeping sense of dread. It is unsettlingly good.

Non-Fiction: The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell

A pangolin’s tongue is longer than its body. It keeps it furled in a nifty pouch near the hip.

A swift flies 200,000 miles in its lifetime. That’s far enough to get to the moon and back – then back to the moon.

There’s a fable that storks deliver babies. In fact, the Nazis used them to air-drop propaganda.

Each of these animals is extraordinary. And each of them may soon disappear from the earth.

A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world’s most endangered animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to fall for the likes of the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human.

Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. Rundell is also the author of a book for adults, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, and writes occasionally for the London Review of Books.