One of my favourite forest fantasies of recent years is Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series. Dryad’s son Dan is a carpenter by trade, and chosen by the mythical Green Man to solve supernatural problems. Half the books are set in English woodland; the other half feature allies or antagonists of a woody nature; and all foreground Dan’s woodworking trade. Fun, fast reads that serve up folklore spiced with an occasional side of horror.

S Jae-Jones wrote a glorious mash-up of Labyrinth and Rossetti’s Goblin Market: Wintersong is a faerie fantasy that begins with an encounter in the woods and ends in an Underground populated by particularly twiggy faeries. For all this is based on very familiar material, it’s a fresh retelling that develops it with gusto – what if you said yes to the Goblin King – to deliver a lush Gothic romance.

You (probably) can’t go wrong if wood is in the actual name: Emily Tesh’s debut novella Silver In The Wood mixes folklore and romance to delightful effect. When the wild man of the wood offers the new landowner shelter (much to the disgust of the dryads), ancient forces awaken to threaten his peace once again.

Sticking with ‘the clue is in the name’ we have Wychwood, first of George Mann’s contemporary fantasy thrillers. A rural murder mystery with macabre supernatural trappings, delivering both creepy folklore and bodies in the woods. The sequel is less foresty and just as compulsive reading.

I’m claiming Jen Williams’s post-apocalyptic banger The Ninth Rain as an unusual forest fantasy: both for the heroes’ adventures into the Wild – a mutant forest that conceals horrifying parasite spirits – and for the central role of Ygseril, holy tree of Ebora. Creative licence? Maybe, but this is way less iffy than say Dominion of the Fallen, which has a surprising number of invasive trees for an undeniably urban fantasy.