The leaves are turning, the air feels crisp, the word “pumpkin” can be seen or heard around 250 times a day, school is back in session, and it’s the perfect time to get lost in a moody and atmospheric book.

These books, as dark as they can be, uplift me in the best ways and I hope the following recommendations can do the same for you.

When it comes to love, Emma is cursed. Every guy she dates finds his true love after they break up. But it turns out she’s not the only one afflicted with this condition…

Jude was seven when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there - but many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.

As shells rain down on Flanders and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging - or better left behind entirely.

When Gemma gets dumped by her long-term boyfriend, she reacts the way any reasonable twenty-eight-year-old would: by getting drunk with her sister, her kooky aunt, and her best friend, Dax. After one too many margaritas, they decide to perform a love-cleansing spell that promises to erase Gemma’s ex from her memory. They follow all the instructions, including a platonic kiss from Dax to seal the deal.

Deeply introverted Catriona Campbell wants the right to vote and a professorship at Oxford. She dreams of romance, too, but since all her attempts at love have ended badly, she now keeps her desires firmly locked inside her head - until she climbs out of a Scottish loch after a good swim and finds herself face-to-face with a stranger… who turns out to be her father’s attractive new colleague.

Viola Marek is a struggling real estate agent, and a vampire.

Fox D’Mora is a medium, and though he is also most definitely a shameless fraud, he isn’t entirely without his uses - seeing as he’s actually the godson of Death.

When Viola seeks out Fox to help her with the ghost-infested mansion, he becomes inextricably involved in a quest that neither he nor Vi expects (or wants).

Once there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London.

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it. For Clementine West, that means burying her head in her work as a book publicist, being practical, and forgetting the silly things her beloved aunt Analea taught her - like living wide and chasing the moon. Clementine would rather stay grounded and keep her heart safe. For the last six months, she’s done just that.

But when she moves into her late aunt’s apartment and finds a strange man standing in the kitchen - a man with kind eyes, a Southern drawl, and a taste for lemon pies - her well-laid plans begin to fall apart. Because he’s the type of man who, before it all, she would’ve fallen head over heels for. And she still might.

Summer, a lawyer and PR person for her father’s business must help bull-rider Rhett clean up his image.

On a bitter cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster Ichigo.

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse.

In this thrilling conclusion to The Last Hours series, James and Cordelia must save London - and their marriage.

I’m actually quite proud of my reading accomplishments this year as, with a new job, it has been more difficult to find the time. But I set realistic goals for myself. Ones I know I can achieve as long as I try. I set myself up to read 80 books (last year I’d read 100 so I knew this was attainable), I promised I’d get into poetry (which I read but didn’t like), made sure to squeeze in some timeless classics, and actively sought to diversify my reading list every single time I went book shopping. Some amazing reads stood out to me this year above all others so here are the top 12 that I loved this year:

For as long as she can remember, Evangeline Fox as believed in true love and happy endings… until she learns that the love of her life will marry another.

Desperate to stop the wedding and to heal her wounded heart, Evangeline strikes a deal with the charismatic, but wicked, Prince of Hearts. In exchange for his help he asks for three kisses, to be given at the time and place of his choosing.

A pasture of dead trees. A hostile takeover of the Santa barn by a family of raccoons. And shipments that have mysteriously gone missing. Lovelight Farms is not the magical winter wonderland of Stella Bloom’s dreams. In an effort to save the Christmas tree farm she’s loved since she was a kid, she enters a contest with instafamous influencer, Evelyn St. James. With the added publicity and the $100,000 cash prize, she might just be able to save the farm from its financial woes. There’s just one problem. To make the farm seem like a romantic destination for the holidays, she lied on the application and said she owns Lovelight Farms with her boyfriend. Only… there is no boyfriend. Enter best friend Luka Peters. He just came home for some hot chocolate, and somehow got a farm and a serious girlfriend in the process.

Lana Montgomery is everything the quirky small town Moose Springs, Alaska can’t stand: a rich socialite with dreams of changing things for the better. But Lana’s determined to prove that she belongs… even if it means trading her stilettos for snow boots and tracking one of the town’s hairiest Christmas mysteries: the Santa Moose, an antlered Grinch hell-bent on destroying every bit of holiday cheer (and tinsel) it can sink its teeth into. And really… how hard could it be?

The last few years have been tough on Rick Harding, and it’s not getting any easier now that his dream girl’s back in town. When Lana accidentally tranquilizes him instead of the Santa Moose, it’s clear she needs help, fast… and this could be his chance to finally catch her eye. It’s an all-out Christmas war, but if they can nab that darn moose before it destroys the town, Rick and Lana might finally find a place where they both belong… together.

Cassidy Blake’s parents are The Inspecters, a (somewhat inept) ghost-hunting team. But Cass herself can REALLY see ghosts. In fact, her best friend, Jacob, just happens to be one. When The Inspecters head to ultra-haunted Edinburgh, Scotland, for their new TV show, Cass - and Jacob - come along. In Scotland, Cass is surrounded by ghosts, not all of them friendly. Then she meets Lara, a girl who can also see the dead. But Lara tells Cassidy that as an In-betweener, their job is to send ghosts permanently beyond the Veil. Cass isn’t sure about her new mission, but she does know the sinister Red Raven haunting the city doesn’t belong in her world. Cassidy’s powers will draw her into an epic fight that stretched through the worlds of the living and the dead, in order to save herself.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the patter of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house, a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

A brash bounty hunter and an energetic elementary schoolteacher: the murder-solving team no one asked for, but thanks to these pesky attempts on my life, we’re stuck together, come hell or high tide.