Most Read Fairy Tales Books

A pilot crash-lands in the Sahara Desert, hundreds of miles from any help, and there he meets a small boy who asks him, without preamble, to draw a sheep. The boy is a prince who has come from a tiny asteroid, B-612, where he tends three volcanoes and cares for a single, vain, beloved rose. As the pilot works to repair his plane and stay alive, the little prince tells him about his journey across the planets and the strange grown-ups he met along the way. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 fable is deceptively simple: a children's story on its surface, and beneath it a meditation on love, loss, loneliness, and the way adults forget what truly matters. Its most famous lesson — that "what is essential is invisible to the eye" — is delivered by a fox the prince befriends and then must leave behind. One of the most translated and best-loved books ever written, The Little Prince is gentle, sad, and quietly profound, illustrated with the author's own watercolors.

Scarlett Dragna has spent her whole life on a small, isolated island under the thumb of a cruel and violent father, dreaming of Caraval, the legendary once-a-year performance where the audience doesn't just watch the spectacle but becomes part of it. With her arranged marriage looming, she has all but given up hope of ever seeing it. Then the long-awaited invitation arrives, and her reckless, magnetic sister Tella whisks her away to the mysterious island where the game is held. Almost at once, Tella is kidnapped by Legend, Caraval's enigmatic master of ceremonies, and made the prize at the center of this year's game. Scarlett has just five nights to find her sister before Caraval ends, navigating a world where nothing is quite what it seems and where losing herself in the illusion could cost her everything. Aided by a charming, secretive sailor named Julian, she is pulled deeper into a dazzling, dangerous puzzle in which love, deceit, and magic are impossible to tell apart. Stephanie Garber's debut is a lush, atmospheric young-adult fantasy built on a central warning: it's only a game. Rich with sensory magic and sleight-of-hand twists, Caraval launched a bestselling series and a wider fairy-tale universe.

• quest
• coming of age

Four evacuee siblings step through an old wardrobe into Narnia, a land of talking beasts held in endless winter by the White Witch. Guided by the great lion Aslan, they're drawn into a fight for Narnia's freedom that costs one of them a terrible betrayal — and Aslan an even greater price.

• portal fantasy
• sacrifice
• betrayal
• redemption arc

Jude was seven years old when a faerie knight murdered her parents and carried her and her two sisters across the sea to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude is a mortal girl raised among immortals — and she wants nothing more than to belong, even though the fey despise humans and take cruel pleasure in reminding her that she does not. Chief among her tormentors is Prince Cardan, the youngest and most vicious son of the High King. To secure a place at court and protect herself and her sisters, Jude defies him — and is drawn into a dangerous web of palace intrigue, shifting alliances, and outright treason. As rival factions maneuver for the throne, she discovers she is willing to do almost anything, and become almost anyone, to survive and to win power in a world that was never meant to be hers. The first book in Holly Black's bestselling Folk of the Air trilogy, The Cruel Prince is a sharp, seductive fantasy of ambition, betrayal, and the fine line between hatred and desire.

• enemies to lovers
• court intrigue
• morally grey

Thirteen-year-old Conor is visited nightly by a monster in the form of an ancient yew tree. It tells him three stories and demands a fourth in return: the truth Conor is hiding, about his mother's illness and the nightmare he can't bear to name. Conceived by Siobhan Dowd, written by Patrick Ness, and illustrated by Jim Kay, this Carnegie Medal-winning fable is a fierce, humane story about grief and the hard mercy of honesty.

• coming of age

Bunny is Mona Awad's cult dark-academia novel — a surreal, savagely funny, horror-tinged satire of female friendship, creative ambition, and the ache to belong. Samantha Mackey is a scholarship outsider in the tiny, hyper-selective MFA fiction program at New England's Warren University. She loathes her cohort: a clique of twee, wealthy women who call one another "Bunny" and seem to move and speak as a single saccharine organism. Then an invitation arrives, and against every instinct Samantha finds herself pulled into their orbit — and into the strange, ritualistic "Workshop" they hold off campus. As Samantha sinks deeper into the Bunnies' cloying, sinister world, the line between imagination and reality dissolves. Awad twists the familiar "outsider joins the mean-girl clique" story into something grotesque and hallucinatory, equal parts campus comedy and body-horror fever dream. Unsettling, allusive, and deliberately disorienting, Bunny rewards readers who like their literary fiction genuinely strange.

• unreliable narrator
• found family

This classic tale follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose heart is as cold as the winter air. On Christmas Eve, he's visited by three spirits who show him the error of his ways. Can these spectral encounters help him find the true spirit of Christmas before it's too late?

• redemption arc

Exiled to the mortal world and stripped of her power, Jude Duarte is pulled back into Faerie when her twin sister comes to her in desperation. Returning means facing the court that cast her out, a realm sliding toward war, and her unfinished bond with Cardan. To reclaim what she lost and save Elfhame, Jude stakes everything on one bold deception. The blazing conclusion to Holly Black's Folk of the Air trilogy.

• enemies to lovers
• court intrigue
• morally grey

Charlie Bucket is a poor, kind-hearted boy who lives in a tiny house with his parents and four bedridden grandparents, gazing longingly at the enormous chocolate factory that dominates his town. The factory belongs to the eccentric, secretive genius Willy Wonka, who has not been seen in years — until he announces that five Golden Tickets have been hidden in Wonka Bars, and their finders will be given a tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of sweets. Against all odds, Charlie finds the last ticket. Alongside four spectacularly ill-behaved children, he steps into a wonderland of chocolate rivers, everlasting gobstoppers, and the mysterious Oompa-Loompas. One by one, the other children's greed and bad habits get the better of them, and it becomes clear that Wonka's tour is also a test. Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a beloved modern classic — gleefully inventive, a little wicked, and warmly moral — that has enchanted children and adults for generations.

After his family is murdered one night, a toddler wanders out of his home and up the hill into an old graveyard, where the resident ghosts take him in and grant him the Freedom of the Graveyard. Named Nobody Owens — Bod for short — he is raised by a loving pair of ghostly parents and watched over by Silas, a mysterious guardian who is neither living nor dead and who can pass beyond the graveyard's walls to bring the boy food and knowledge. Growing up among the dead, Bod learns their uncanny skills — to Fade, to Dreamwalk, to slip through the boundary between worlds — while longing for the world of the living. But the man who killed his family is still out there, patiently searching for the child who got away, and the graveyard cannot shelter Bod forever. Neil Gaiman's Newbery- and Carnegie-winning The Graveyard Book is a spellbinding, gently macabre coming-of-age fantasy — a graveyard reimagining of The Jungle Book, full of wonder, danger, and heart.

• found family
• coming of age

Matilda Wormwood is a tiny girl with a colossal brain. By four she has taught herself to read, devoured the local library, and developed a keen sense of justice—none of which impresses her crooked, television-addled parents, who treat her as a nuisance. When Matilda is finally sent to school, she meets Miss Honey, a kind young teacher who recognizes her genius, and Miss Trunchbull, a monstrous headmistress who treats children as vermin to be flung, locked away, and terrorized. Armed with her wits, a taste for mischief, and a strange new power she is only beginning to understand, Matilda decides to fight back—on her own behalf and on Miss Honey's. What follows is a gleeful campaign against grown-up cruelty, waged by a small girl who refuses to be underestimated. One of Roald Dahl's best-loved novels, Matilda is a funny, big-hearted story about the power of books, cleverness, and standing up to bullies—no matter how enormous they are.

Evangeline Fox has always believed in true love and happy endings — until she learns that the boy she loves is about to marry her stepsister. Desperate to stop the wedding, she turns to the one person legend says can help: Jacks, the beautiful and dangerous Prince of Hearts. He agrees, on a single condition — three kisses, to be claimed at the time and place of his choosing. The bargain works, but not at all the way Evangeline hoped. Swept from her small town into the glittering, treacherous world of the Magnificent North, she discovers that deals with immortals always cost more than they promise, and that Jacks wants something from her far greater than a stopped wedding. Caught among wicked princes, cursed fairy tales, and her own stubborn hope, Evangeline must decide who to trust in a place where every happily ever after seems to come with a catch. Set in the world of Caraval, Once Upon a Broken Heart is a lush, romantic fantasy about heartbreak, dangerous bargains, and the fine line between a fairy tale and a curse.

A collected edition of Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a world of shrinking potions, a grinning cat, and a tyrannical Queen of Hearts, then later climbs through a mirror into a chessboard world of talking twins and a knight who keeps falling off his horse.

• portal fantasy
• fish out of water

Un aviateur tombe en panne au beau milieu du désert du Sahara, à mille milles de toute terre habitée. C'est là qu'un étrange petit garçon lui apparaît et lui demande de dessiner un mouton. Ce garçon est un prince venu d'une minuscule planète, l'astéroïde B-612, où il veille sur trois volcans et sur une rose unique, orgueilleuse et fragile, qu'il aime. Tandis que l'aviateur tente de réparer son avion, le petit prince lui raconte son voyage de planète en planète et les grandes personnes bien étranges qu'il y a rencontrées. Publié en 1943, ce conte d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry se lit comme une histoire pour enfants, mais cache une méditation sur l'amour, la perte, la solitude et tout ce que les adultes ont oublié. Sa leçon la plus célèbre — « on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux » — lui est confiée par un renard qu'il apprivoise puis doit quitter. L'un des livres les plus traduits et les plus aimés au monde, illustré par les aquarelles de l'auteur.

Seven-year-old Elsa is precocious, "different," and often in trouble at school — but she has her granny, a seventy-seven-year-old force of nature who fires paintball guns from balconies, breaks every rule, and is Elsa's best and only real friend. Best of all, Granny is the teller of fairy tales set in the Land of Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas, stories that have shielded Elsa from a lonely world. When Granny dies of cancer, she leaves Elsa one last, greatest adventure: a treasure hunt of letters, each an apology to someone Granny wronged, to be delivered by Elsa herself. As Elsa carries the letters to the eccentric neighbors in her apartment building — a wurse, a monster, a woman with a fear of everything — she discovers that Granny's fantastical tales were built from the very real, often painful lives of the people all around her, and that the fairy tales were true in ways she never understood. Warm, funny, and quietly devastating, Fredrik Backman's second novel (first published in Swedish in 2013) is a story about grief, imagination, and the way stories help us survive one another. Several of its characters, including Britt-Marie, go on to appear in Backman's later books.

In the land of Ingary, where seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, Sophie Hatter has resigned herself to a dull future. As the eldest of three sisters, she is sure she is doomed to fail first and worst, so she settles quietly into the family hat shop. Then the fearsome Witch of the Waste sweeps in and curses her, turning Sophie into a stooped old woman who cannot tell anyone what has happened to her. With nothing left to lose, Sophie leaves home and bluffs her way into the magical, ambulatory castle of the notorious Wizard Howl — a vain, slippery heartbreaker rumored to devour the souls of young women. Inside she finds Howl's young apprentice Michael and a sardonic fire demon named Calcifer, who is bound to Howl by a secret contract. Calcifer offers Sophie a bargain: break the spell that ties him to Howl, and he will break the spell that has aged her. Diana Wynne Jones's beloved fantasy is a witty, warm-hearted tangle of curses, contracts, and mistaken assumptions, in which a supposedly ordinary young woman discovers she is anything but. The first book in the World of Howl trilogy, it later inspired Studio Ghibli's celebrated animated film.

• coming of age

Mika Moon has spent her life following the first rule of witches: keep your head down, stay apart from other witches, and never let anyone see what you can do. Orphaned young and raised to be alone, she films tongue-in-cheek "witch" videos online as a private joke — until one of them draws a very real invitation. She is asked to come to Nowhere House, a rambling English estate, to tutor three young witches whose untrained magic is beginning to slip out of control. Against every rule she's lived by, Mika accepts, and finds at Nowhere House something she never expected: not just three lonely, powerful children who need her, but a whole ramshackle found family of caretakers who have gathered to protect them. Chief among them is Jamie, the household's prickly, fiercely protective librarian, who wants Mika gone almost as much as the children want her to stay. Sangu Mandanna's The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is a warm, cozy fantasy romance about belonging. Charming and low-stakes in the best way, it's a story about the families we build, the walls we lower, and the courage it takes to finally let yourself be wanted.

• found family

In a futuristic New Beijing, a deadly plague and a looming lunar threat cast a shadow over society. Cyborg mechanic Cinder, treated as less than human, finds her life irrevocably changed when she encounters Prince Kai. Their connection ignites an intergalactic conflict, forcing Cinder to uncover her buried past to save her world.

• chosen one
• coming of age

On her eighteenth birthday, Winnie Darling is dragged to Neverland by Pan, the merciless Never King, and his Lost Boys, who need her bloodline to sustain their magic. Refusing to be a pawn, Winnie finds the line between captor and desire dangerously thin. Book one of the Vicious Lost Boys, a dark adult Peter Pan retelling.

• enemies to lovers
• morally grey

Evangeline Fox appears to have her fairy-tale ending — a prince, a castle, a happy life — but she has no memory of what it cost her, and those around her mean to keep it hidden. As enemies close in and the truth claws its way to the surface, the story that began with a broken heart reaches its final reckoning. The conclusion to the trilogy.

• morally grey
• forbidden love

Eleanor West runs a boarding school for children who fell through doors into other worlds and were cast back. Nancy, newly arrived from the still Halls of the Dead, finds kinship among fellow students until a murder threatens the school's fragile sanctuary.

• portal fantasy
• found family
• coming of age

Shiori, the only princess of Kiata, hides forbidden magic — and when it slips loose, her sorceress stepmother banishes her and curses her six brothers into cranes, warning that if Shiori speaks a single word, one brother will die. Voiceless and alone, she must break the enchantment and uncover her stepmother's secrets. Elizabeth Lim's lush YA fantasy retells the fairy tale of the wild swans through East Asian mythology.

• quest

Charlie Reade is seventeen, an ordinary high-schooler carrying the private weight of a mother killed years earlier and a father he pulled back from the edge of grief and drink. When he helps his reclusive neighbor Howard Bowditch after a bad fall, Charlie inherits the old man's aging German shepherd, Radar — and the secret of the locked shed behind his house. Inside the shed is a passage to Empis, another world of wonder and terror where a great city has fallen silent under a curse and a monstrous tyrant threatens everything. Drawn there first by the hope of saving Radar, Charlie becomes bound up in Empis's fate, cast as an unlikely hero in a struggle that echoes the fairy tales he grew up on — darker, stranger, and far more dangerous than any of them. Fairy Tale is Stephen King's love letter to the stories that shaped him: a coming-of-age portal fantasy that moves from small-town realism into pure, shadowed enchantment.

• portal fantasy
• coming of age

A curse threatens everything Evangeline Fox thought she'd won, forcing her into an uneasy alliance with Jacks, the Prince of Hearts. Together they chase legends across the Magnificent North toward an arch that can rewrite a story's ending — if they can trust each other long enough to reach it. The twisty second book in the series.

• morally grey
• enemies to lovers

Kahlil Gibran's beloved 1923 book of prose poetry. As the prophet Almustafa prepares to sail home from the city of Orphalese, its people ask him to share his wisdom. In twenty-six poetic sermons he speaks on love, marriage, work, joy and sorrow, freedom, and death — a touchstone of modern spiritual literature.

A boy travels to a moon made of stories to save his father's gift of storytelling from a villain determined to silence it forever.

• quest

Emily Wilde is one of the world's foremost scholars of dryadology — the study of faeries — and by far the most awkward. Brilliant, blunt, and far more comfortable with folklore than with people, she arrives in the tiny, snowbound northern village of Hrafnsvik to complete her life's work: the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faerie lore. What she lacks in social grace she intends to make up for in rigor, cataloguing the local Hidden Ones one careful field note at a time. Her plans are complicated by two things. The first is the villagers, whom she keeps offending. The second is her insufferably charming academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, who follows her to Hrafnsvik with secrets of his own — including one about his true nature that could change everything between them. Told through Emily's wry journal entries, Heather Fawcett's cozy fantasy blends folklore, mystery, and a slow-burn romance into a warm, witty adventure among the Folk — perfect for readers who like their faeries genuinely dangerous and their heroines gloriously prickly.

• slow burn
• fish out of water

What if Belle's own mother was the enchantress who cursed the Beast? When Belle touches the enchanted rose, she's flooded with memories of her long-lost mother, who is revealed to be the very person responsible for the Beast's predicament. Belle and the Beast must work together to uncover a deep family secret, twenty-one years in the making, that connects their pasts in unexpected ways.

• mystery box
• quest
• family saga

Tress lives on a small island in the Emerald Sea — a sea of emerald-colored spores rather than water, where a single drop of rain causes the spores to sprout deadly vines in seconds. When the boy she loves is taken away by the pirate captain Crow and condemned to serve the Sorceress of Midnight, Tress does what no one from her island has ever done: she boards a ship and goes to sea. Narrated with warmth and wit by Hoid — the wandering enigma known across the Cosmere — Tress of the Emerald Sea is a swashbuckling adventure described by its author as his love letter to readers who cherished The Princess Bride. Originally written as a gift for Sanderson's wife Emily and part of the 2022 Kickstarter that raised $41.7 million (the largest Kickstarter of its time), the book was published in 2023 as Secret Project 1.

• quest

Belle, a lonely skincare-obsessed clerk, travels to Southern California after her estranged mother's sudden death and is lured into La Maison de Meduse, the cultish luxury spa her mother worshipped. As its mirrors and rituals pull her under, Belle faces the demons behind the glass. A surreal, Snow White-tinged horror satire of beauty and grief.

• unreliable narrator