1. Darkly cosy, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History draws you into another world – a small university campus in snowy Vermont – and holds you in its grip from the narrator’s first killer line. Timeless yet old-fashioned, literary yet entertaining, still a dazzling read.
2. Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan is set in 1950s Bombay and introduces India’s first female detective, the charismatic Insp Persis Wadia. Cosy crime with complex clues and a decidedly Christie-esque sensibility.
3. Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier, a swashbuckling, gothic adventure set in Cornwall – to be consumed, ideally, with whisky by a roaring fire in a clifftop Cornish hotel, crashing waves optional.
4. Set on a tiny Caribbean island in the 1970s, Monique Roffey’s beguiling novel The Mermaid of Black Conch sees a centuries-old, mythic mermaid fall in love with a fisher. A tale to lose yourself in.
5. In Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, Peter Hoeg creates an incredibly evocative murder mystery, taking our eponymous heroine on a quest from Copenhagen to a frozen island off Greenland where a dangerous secret lies buried in the ice.
6. Comforting and cocooning, the world of PG Wodehouse erases sharp edges and never more so than in Summer Lightning, a gentle literary farce set in Blandings castle, a place where nothing bad can ever happen.
7. In Jasmine Guillory’s contemporary romance Drunk on Love, a steamy one-night stand between two strangers who end up being colleagues in California’s Napa Valley kicks off this deliciously escapist contemporary romance. Perfect for curling up on the sofa.
8. The 39 Steps by John Buchan is still the ultimate adventure novel to cosy up with on a winter’s night: a man on the run, a train ride to remotest Scotland, rolling mist and a sinister plot – joyful armchair escapism.
9. With more than an echo of Brief Encounter, Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers creates a flawless fictional world set in 1950s suburban south London, rich in romantic anguish and sharp in nostalgic domestic detail.
10. This may be a satire on rustic life, but warmth, humour and humanity wrap themselves around you in Stella Gibbons’s 1932 award-winning comic masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm. Irresistible.