Fiction that feels like a warm blanket

Some books don't want to shock you. They want to sit with you. Matt Haig's The Midnight Library is the definition of the form — a novel about all the lives you didn't live that somehow leaves you kinder to the one you did.

Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow spans thirty years of friendship and the games two people build to survive it; it aches, but it's the good kind of ache. And Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun watches humanity through the eyes of an artificial friend, quietly asking what love actually asks of us.

None of these are small books. But they're generous ones — the kind you finish at midnight and immediately want to press into someone else's hands.