Told by one of the most popular storytellers of our time, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is a darker Alice in Wonderland. A little girl named Coraline moves into a block of flats with her parents. She is warned by her neighbour not to open a particular door, but she does so anyway, and finds herself in an alternate version of her own life.

She meets her “Other Mother” and “Other Father”, who both have buttons sewn in where their eyes should be. The alternate world is magical – her parents are more devoted to her, her neighbours perform entertaining acts, and a black cat she encountered in the neighbourhood can talk to her.

Then, Coraline is asked by the Other Mother to stay on in the alternate world forever, and discovers three ghost children living in the same world.

“A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door...Not for the faint-hearted – who are mostly adults anyway – but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on,” says a Kirkus review of the book.

Coraline won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for the Best Novella in 2003, and the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for the Best Work for Young Readers. It has been adapted into a stop-motion film by director Henry Selick.