For hundreds of years, men and women have told stories about the strange people, beautiful as starlight, fierce as wolves, and heartless as ice. These are not tales for children. They reveal the fairies as a passionate, proud, brutal people.

Explore Fairy Traditions, a book by Jeremy Harte, draws on legends, ballads and testimony from throughout Britain and Ireland to reveal what the fairies were really like. It looks at changelings, brownies, demon lovers, the fairy host and abduction into the Otherworld.

Stories and motifs are followed down the centuries to reveal the changing nature of fairy lore as it was told to famous figures like WB Yeats and Sir Walter Scott. His research is based on primary sources and many errors about fairy tradition are laid to rest.

It has recently won the Katherine Briggs prize for the best book about folklore in London and is a fascinating insight into the role Fairies played in the emotional world of our ancestors.