‘The Book of Witching’ by C.J. Cooke

Hardback, Harper Collins, £16.99

Four hundred years separate them. One book binds them.

Glasgow 2024: Clem waits by her daughter’s hospital bed. Erin was found on an idyllic beach in Fynhallow Bay, Orkney with catastrophic burns and only one memory: her name is Nyx.

But how did she get these burns? And how did her boyfriend end up burned alive?

Orkney 1594: accused of witchcraft, Alison Balfour awaits trial. The punishment? To be burned alive.

Separated by four hundred years but bound by the Book of Witching, two women stand imperilled. Can they unlock a centuries-old mystery?

Perfect Hop Tu Naa witchy reading.

‘Hauntings’ by Neil Oliver

Paperback, Penguin, £10.99

Super for spooky storytelling, this a collection of 25 ghostly tales from across Britain.

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise, and our skin turns cold.

Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans centuries and explores eerie castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.

Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions appears gossamer thin.