September's recommendation: Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees.
Back when Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell came out, I read a review of it which commented that this was what the fantasy genre would look like had its founding text been, not The Lord of the Rings, but Lud-in-the-Mist.
It's a fair assessment. Both of them have a sort of eighteenth-century rural-town sensibility to them, and both deal with Faerie in a manner rather different than Tolkien's. Lud-in-the-Mist is similar to The King of Elfland's Daughter (which was written around the same time, the mid-1920s) in that the characters dwell quite near to the borders of Faerie, and have a rather disfunctional relationship with it. Lud-in-the-Mist is a town that sits at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is a broad watercourse running through most of the land of Dorimare, and it brings wealth and commerce to Lud. The Dapple, on the other hand, is a much smaller stream, and it has its source in Fairyland -- a truth which the inhabitants of Lud would very much like to forget.
Ignorance, unfortunately, is not something they can arrange for. Every so often, by means they've never (despite their best efforts) been able to identify and put a stop to, the sober and reliable townspeople of Lud find that someone has smuggled in fairy fruit, the eating of which causes all manner of deranged and inappropriate behavior. The difficulty of stopping this is compounded by the fact that no one wants to really address such a distasteful subject directly; in fact, to speak of fairy things at all is considered obscene. In the eyes of the law, such things don't even exist, which results in an odd legal fiction where their legislation against fairy fruit refers to it as a certain kind of woven silk.
The main character of Lud-in-the-Mist is Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the community and currently Mayor of the Town, whose respectability and authority as Mayor are sharply threatened when a veritable epidemic of fairy fruit-eating begins to plague the town. Soon the Mayor's own son is screaming to the world that he's eaten fairy fruit, and the entire population of Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy for Young Ladies has dashed off for the Debatable Hills that mark the border of Fairyland. No one can seem to figure out how the fruit is being smuggled in, nor where it's hidden, nor how it's getting to the young people of Lud, nor what to do about any of this, and it doesn't help that Master Chanticleer seems rather to be going off in the deep end -- for he had an experience in his youth which never quite left him, and against which all his respectability has been a kind of carefully-built shield that is now falling apart.
Like The King of Elfland's Daughter, this novel addresses rather directly what happens when the mundane world and Fairyland come into contact, and what the proper relationship of the two is. Lud-in-the-Mist has a fascinating history, too, with the mad Duke Aubrey and all, which you pick up bit by bit as you proceed through the novel, and which lends to the town a certain flavor that makes it be not quite the perfectly English place it would otherwise seem. It makes me want to write genteel, rural, slightly old-fashioned fantasy, which you can probably tell by the effect it's had on my writing style in this review. I have nothing against the kind of fantasy we have, the fantasy descended from Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, but this is another breed, different in style and content, and it very definitely has its own kind of charm.