If the folklore bones and moral bite of tales like “Ayama and the Thorn Wood” and “Little Knife” hooked you, Spinning Silver will feel like stepping into a similarly old-world fable sharpened for grown readers. Miryem’s talent for turning silver into gold tangles her with the icy Staryk king, while Irina must outwit a tsar possessed by a fire demon. Like Bardugo’s reworked trials and bargains, Novik threads clever deals, impossible tasks, and a heroine’s grit into a rich, wintry tapestry.

Drawn to the peril and seduction of power in stories like “When Water Sang Fire” and the river’s choosing in “Little Knife”? In The Darkest Part of the Forest, siblings Hazel and Ben live beside a glass coffin holding a horned fae prince—until he wakes. Oaths, blades, and old promises twist into treacherous enchantments, capturing the same alluring, razor-edged magic that makes Bardugo’s darkest tales sing.

If you loved the jewel-box sentences and decadent atmosphere of The Language of Thorns—from the candlelit menace of “The Soldier Prince” to the lyrical menace of “The Too-Clever Fox”—Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a feast. Her Bluebeard bride, feral “Beauty,” and wolf-haunted maidens are rendered in sumptuous, sensual prose that glitters even as it cuts, delivering the same heady blend of elegance and danger.

If the standalone, satisfying snap of Bardugo’s tales—each a polished gem, like “Ayama and the Thorn Wood” or “The Soldier Prince”—appealed to you, Kissing the Witch offers a chain of brief retellings where familiar heroines speak new truths to one another. Each story stands on its own but echoes through the next, delivering that same compact, fable-like power with a quietly radical twist.

If Bardugo’s sharp reversals thrilled you—the predator unmasked in “The Too-Clever Fox,” the unsettling reframe in “When Water Sang Fire”—Byatt’s collection is a treasure of narrative switchbacks. In the title novella, a scholar frees a djinn whose gifts complicate desire and fate, while tales like “The Story of the Eldest Princess” flip destiny’s script in ways that will scratch your itch for elegant, unexpected turns.