A four-year-old in Frozen wellies feeds scraps to a farmer's pigs and spots something odd among the peelings. John Marrs's first short story follows the doting grandmother beside her, whose side job is making bodies disappear, through a month of village spite. Wicked and brisk, with a reveal that arrives too predictably.

A child's crayon heart in a bedside drawer, and beneath it a cheap gold necklace that should not exist. Debra Webb's new thriller is about a survivor whose story is being taken from her, and about two girls whose friendship went catastrophically wrong.

In a Devon meadow, someone has spelled a Latin word out of acorns. By breakfast the boy Kit Herondale swore never to see again is soaking wet on his doorstep. Clare's final Shadowhunter series begins with grief, a faerie prince and a long train ride.

A homeless woman in a peacock-blue hat corrects a stranger's grammar beside a fountain, then tells him the happiest and worst day of her life. Levi's word-of-mouth hit is tender and often very funny, though nearly everyone in it is redeemed on schedule.

Sixty years after leaving her childhood home in York, an actress climbs its narrow stairs to the attic and finds two of her drawings still on the wall. The memoir that follows talks its way through a whole life, and rarely in a straight line.