I’m so excited to take part in the Non-Fiction November blog event this year! Running for five weeks from Monday, October 27th to Sunday, November 30th, each week participants will discuss different prompts relating to their non-fiction reading.

Week 3 is hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home.

• This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like!

I found this week difficult because my fiction and non-fiction tastes are wildly different! However, I think I managed to pull a couple of pairings together, perhaps rather tenuously in some cases… but still, I have tried my best!

My first pairing is The Lost Folk by Lally MacBeth and Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert.

The Lost Folk explores the history and possible future of Folk in the United Kingdom. I loved this book, and enjoyed learning about a lot of aspects of folk I was unfamiliar with. Folklore is one of my absolute favourite things to have in fiction, so I had a few to choose from for a pair, but I felt that Mischief Acts was the closest. It is a fiction set in the UK about the myth of Herne the Hunter, following him from the past right through into the future. The book is stuffed with historical folklore and tradition and is one of my top reads of 2025.

This second pairing is a little more of a stretch, but you can probably see where I’m going from the covers. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and Human Scars on Planet Skin by Effie Joe Stock and Nathaniel Luscombe.

I feel like Entangled Life needs no introduction, but it is a book all about fungi. We see the world from the view of fungi here, learning about all the different kinds there are. Fungi can change our brains, heal us and shape the world. This is why I thought Human Scars on Planet Skin would be a good pair. In this fiction, the main characters are mushroom people, and they are trying to bring their lands back to life after humans tried and failed to colonise their planet.

This final pairing is honestly just a bit of fun. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones, and Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a hilarious compendium of fantasy tropes. I genuinely haven’t laughed so much at something before or since. Covering everything from stew, to dungeons to horses, everything you ever need to know about fantasy worlds is in here. To pair, I picked Kings of the Wyld, but honestly any classic or epic fantasy book would fit here. Kings… is a modern quest story with all the classic tropes. The band gets back together with their fancy swords and trek across the land in search of a daughter. It’s also very humorous, which is why I chose it above others!

You Tell Me: Do you have a fiction and non-fiction pair to share?