Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

It’s time to talk about books with non-human characters — animals or supernatural creatures… maybe even a park bench. Who are your favourite non-human characters?

This is a selection of some of the books with non-human characters that I’ve read and enjoyed. I’ve read all these books, so the links in the titles take you to my reviews.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. The main character in this book is a stray cat, Chibi, who made herself at home with a couple in their thirties who lived in a small rented house in a quiet part of Tokyo. At first the cat was cautious and just peeked inside their little house but eventually Chibi spent a lot of time with the couple coming and going as she pleased.

The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale –  a wonderful book about Papa Jack’s Emporium in London, a toyshop extraordinaire. The toys it sells aren’t ordinary toys – they seem alive, from patchwork dogs, to flying pegasi, Russian dolls that climb out of one another, runnerless rocking horses, whales that devour ships, fire-breathing dragons and many others to the toy soldiers that wage war on each other.

The Good People by Hannah Kent is set in 1825/6, a long gone world of people living in an isolated community, a place where superstition and a belief in fairies held sway. People talk of others being ‘fairy-swept’ or ‘away with the fairies’, and kept with the music and lights, dancing under the fairy hill.This is not a fairy story, but one in which their existence is terrifyingly real to the people of the valley. The villagers believe that the fairies live in Piper’s Grave, ‘the lurking fairy fort’, at the end of the valley, a place where few people went, a neglected and wild place. People see lights there, glowing near a crooked whitethorn tree that stood in a circle of stone. Nóra is completely unable to cope with Micheál, her four-year old grandson. There is talk that he is ‘fairy-struck’.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley, described as ‘steampunk’, this is a mixture of historical fact and fantasy set in Victorian times, both in London and Japan. The main characters are Thaniel Stapleton, who works in the telegraphy department of the Home Office in London, Keita Mori, watchmaker extraordinaire and an inventor of amazing clockwork creations and Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist who sneaks into an Oxford library dressed as a man, desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether. I loved Katsu, the clockwork octopus, which was made by Mori.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum. I enjoyed this entertaining story, pure escapism, which I would have loved as a child, following Dorothy’s adventures in the Land of Oz after the cyclone whisked her house high in the air out of Kansas and set it down on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, thus killing her. Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, are very anxious to get back home to Kansas and they set out on the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz to help them. On the way she meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, who go with her as they want the Wizard to give them brains, a heart and courage respectively.

Their journey is interrupted in various places and by a variety of creatures, some very dangerous indeed; as in most fairy tales, there is a fair amount of violence in the book, as Dorothy and her friends combat the Wicked Witch of the East.