The 25 Best Holiday Books for a Festive Read

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Thanksgiving is over, which means it's holiday season! There's one month to Christmas; meanwhile, Hanukkah begins the evening of December 7, the Winter Solstice is celebrated on December 21, and Kwanzaa begins on December 26.

In celebration of the upcoming holidays, many readers chose to seek out holiday books during this season—including everything from classic tales to Christmas romance novels. Even if the plot doesn't explicitly center around a holiday, reading a book set during December usually evokes a cozy mood, and it doesn't hurt to play some classic Christmas songs to set the mood. (Or, if you'd prefer an explicitly cozy book, we have some reading recommendations for you, too.) Here, 25 holiday books to read this 2023 season:

A Christmas Carol (Penguin Christmas Classics)

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in December 1843, and it was an instant classic. It tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by the ghost of his former business parter and the spirits of Christmases past, present, and future. "I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me," Dickens wrote in the preface. "May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it."

In a Holidaze

Mae is leaving her family's Christmas at a snowy Utah cabin, their last time celebrating at the spot with two other families, but as she's driving away, the whole world goes black and she's back on a plane bound for Utah, repeating the holiday once more. Can Mae get out of the strange time loop, and get her true love under the mistletoe?

Small Things Like These

In the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1985 in a small Irish town, Bill, a coal merchant, is dealing with his busiest season. While delivering coal to the local convent, however, he makes a discovery that forces him to confront his past and the complicity of his town. In their review NPR wrote that the novel reads as a "feminist revision of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol."Poignantly, the book is dedicated to "the women and children who suffered time in Ireland's Magdalen laundries."

Royal Holiday

This holiday romance is inspired by Meghan Markle's mom, Doria Ragland and a fictional private secretary of the Queen. "I NEED a charming romance about the single mother of a new Duchess falling in love with an appropriately aged royal retainer while spending Christmas at Sandringham," Margaret Willison posted on Twitter. Jasmine Guillory replied, ""I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!" and penned this incredible contemporary royal romance.

A Christmas Memory: One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor (Modern Library)

First published in 1956, Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory features his memories of his rural Alabama boyhood. "Imagine a morning in late November," he begins. "A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar..."

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

In this classic Christmas mystery, Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick, Dr. Watson, must find the owner of the shabby hat and festive goose dropped on Tottenham Court Road on Christmas morning. It's a short and sweet holiday novella, perfect to read in one evening.

The Matzah Ball: A Novel

Holidays, of course, doesn't just mean Christmas. There's also a growing genre of Hanukkah romance novels, including Jean Metlzer's utterly delightful The Matzah Ball, about Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, a romance author whose publisher asks her for a Hanukkah romance. (How meta!) "I’ve always been a nice Jewish girl who loves Christmas," Metlzer told JTA. "And every year I go into, say, Target, and there’s a holiday display with all of the Christmas books. Year after year, I went looking for a Hanukkah book, and there never was one. I just wanted to see myself represented on that table. I could envision it: a blue and white book in the sea of red and green."

A Merry Christmas: And Other Christmas Stories

While Little Women can totally count as a classic Christmas read, may we also point you to Louisa May Alcott's holiday tales? (Which of course includes an excerpt of Little Women.) As one reviewer wrote on Amazon, "This collection of heart warming stories was just perfect to curl up and read this Christmas season!" Sounds like the ideal holiday read to us.

Three Holidays and a Wedding

In this charming romance, Maryam Aziz and Anna Gibson are sitting next to each other as they fly to Toronto for the holidays—Maryam is going to her sister's wedding, and Anna is meeting her boyfriend's family for the first time—but when an emergency landing strands them in picture-perfect Snow Falls, neither of their holdiays go as planned.

Holidays on Ice

Humorist David Sedaris authored Holidays on Ice, a holiday essay collection, with essays set during Christmastime—including one that details Sedaris's experiences working as an elf at Macy's during the festive shopping season.

Bright Lights, Big Christmas: A Novel

New Yorkers will be familiar with the premise of Bright Lights, Big City: It follows Kerry, a young woman who travels to the city from her family’s Christmas tree farm to sell trees at one of the street stands that populate New York in November and December. She soon becomes close with the neighbors on the Greenwich Village block, including handsome single dad Patrick, and when an elderly neighbor goes missing, she jumps into action.

The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

Edited by Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries is advertised as the "most complete collection of Yuletide whodunits ever assembled," and we're immediately sold. It includes everything from suspense to cozy mystery to police procedural, and Christmas cases for classic characters including Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

Christmas Holiday

W. Somerset Maugham's novel, Christmas Holiday, was originally published in 1939. It follows Charley, whose father gifts him an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris for Christmas. There, his life changes when he meets Lydia, who has been displaced by the Russian Revolution and pines for Robert, a murderer.

Winter Street

Elin Hilderbrand's first Christmas novel follows the Quinn family at the Winter Street Inn in Nantucket. As the publisher writes: "Before the mulled cider is gone, the delightfully dysfunctional Quinn family will survive a love triangle, an unplanned pregnancy, a federal crime, a small house fire, many shots of whiskey, and endless rounds of Christmas caroling, in this heart-warming novel about coming home for the holidays."

Wreck the Halls: A Novel

This hot romance novel from Tessa Bailey features Mel (short for Melody) and Beat, the adult children of two former bandmates who have to convince their estranged mothers to play a Christmas Eve concert. Mel and Beat were friends as teenagers, but now, as they work together to make this reunion happen, could they be something more?

Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is a classic Christmas ballet, and if you're really a fan, you should read these two versions of the magical tale. As Penguin notes, "this eye-opening new volume presents two of the tale's earliest versions, both in new translations: E.T.A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816), in which a young girl is whisked away to the Land of Toys to help her animated nutcracker defeat the Mouse King, and Alexandre Dumas's 1845 adaptation, The Tale of the Nutcracker, based on Hoffmann's popular work."

Hercule Poirot's Christmas: A Hercule Poirot Mystery

Agatha Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot takes on a Christmas Eve case at Gorston Hall, where patriarch Simeon Lee is found dead upstairs. As the New York Times reviewed, "Poirot has solved some puzzling mysteries in his time but never has his mighty brain functioned more brilliantly than in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas."

With Love, from Cold World

Lauren is a bookkeeper at Cold World, a winter wonderland tourist destination in the middle of Orlando, Florida. When the owner asks her, and her annoying coworker Asa, to come up with proposals to revive Cold World, Lauren's disdain for Asa soon turns into new feelings. A fun, holiday-ish enemies-to-lovers romance.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

This delightful collection of holiday stories from bestselling YA authors (Ally Carter! Jenny Han! Rainbow Rowell! and so many more) is perfect if you can't get enough of festive fiction. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, or just New Year's Eve, there's a story for you in My True Love Gave to Me.

A Christmas to Remember: A Novel (Blessings Book 11)

Romance author Beverly Jenkins sets her latest novel during a Christmas wedding in the town of Henry Adams, Kansas, a town founded by formerly enslaved people. But are Bernadine and Mal actually ready to say "I do"? There's other plots throughout this novel, including what happens when a handsome chef, Thornton, moves to town, but overall it's a moving, romantic story of the power of community.

The Christmas Appeal: A Novella

A local theater group is rehearsing for their Christmas production, Jack and the Beanstalk, when a dead body is found onstage. Lawyers Femi and Charlotte set out to investigate by reading letters, emails, texts, police transcripts, and other bits of found media—and you, the reader, can solve the murder mystery right alongside them.

The Christmas Bookshop

Carmen, newly laid off, reluctantly takes a job at a bookshop in historic Edinburgh, at the behest of her sister, Sofia, who she's not exactly on the best terms with. Will she be able to help save the bookstore, and repair her relationship with her sister, in time for the holidays?

Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe

Melissa de la Cruz gender-swaps Pride and Prejudice with this sweet and hot holiday romance, featuring 29-year-old Darcy Fitzwilliam, a successful working woman in the big city, and Luke Bennet, a 32-year-old carpenter who hasn't left their hometown. It's basically everything you love about a Hallmark movie in a book—in fact, it was literally adapted into a Hallmark movie a few years back.

The Twelve Dates of Christmas

Kate has all but given up on finding love in her sleepy English town, but her best friend decides to sign her up for a dating agency that promises to help single folks find love before the holidays. Before she knows it, she's going on 12 dates with 12 different men—each more disastrous than the last. But this is a romance, so there's a happily ever after—just not what (or shall we say who) Kate was expecting.

The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories: From Hans Christian Andersen to Angela Carter

Last, if you're looking for a giftable book for Christmas, you can't go wrong with this gorgeous clothbound edition of Christmas stories, featuring Truman Capote, Shirley Jackson, Anton Chekhov, Langston Hughes, and more classic tales.

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