23 Books You Should Read This Winter

It’s Christmas on Nantucket, and master storyteller Elin Hilderbrand brings us back to the Winter Street Inn and innkeeper Kelley Quinn in Winter Stroll. When an unexpected visitor arrives, tensions arise and Kelley wonders if he and his family will make it through the holidays intact.

Eustacia “Taisy” Cleary’s father walked out on her family and started another. Seventeen years later, her father is back and wants her to meet her sister, a surly teenager predisposed to hate her, and help in writing a memoir. The Precious One is a beautiful novel about family, secrets, and love.

Something is haunting the halls of the Algonquin Hotel in Dorothy Parker Drank Here. And that something is founding member of the infamous Round Table, the great wit herself, Dorothy Parker. She is not content to go quietly into the white light, and she’s lonely. She just needs a playmate to sign the guest book and be her guest in phantom form, but that’s not as easy as it sounds.

In Lynn Messina’s Prejudice and Pride, we get an update of a favorite classic — but with a gender-bendy twist. You may think you know the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, but here, everything is turned on its head in this fun mashup of chick lit and Regency romance.

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout returns with a story of mothers and daughters, memory, and what really happened. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a must read for book clubs.

What could be more delicious than having a husband who is a restaurant critic? In Elizabeth LaBan’s first novel for adults, The Restaurant Critic's Wife, we find out that it’s not all eclairs and coffee cake. Lila Soto is adjusting to life in a new town with her toddler and baby, but it’s not easy to make friends when her husband is obsessed with keeping his identity secret . . . and hers, too. Away from work and secluded from adult life, Lila wonders where her own identity has gone.

Frankly, my dear, you will give a damn about Stars Over Sunset Boulevard, the story of two very different women working on the set of Gone With the Wind.

Three New York Times bestselling authors team up for one unforgettable story in The Forgotten Room. Three generations of women are connected in this tale of love and family that spans half a century. The mysteries of this one room in a Gilded Age mansion will keep you guessing until the very end.

The Things We Keep is the story of 38-year-old Anna Forster, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. When her family arranges for her to go to an assisted living facility, she struggles to hold on to what she knows, which includes a burgeoning relationship with another young resident at the facility.

In 1992, three groups of teenagers go to the movies to see the film version of their favorite comic book. Over the course of the next two decades, their lives cross in surprising ways. In Some Other World, Maybe is a beautiful novel about coming of age as a young adult.

The era of Truman Capote and his “swans” — the 1950s Manhattan socialites he surrounded himself with — is reimagined in Melanie Benjamin’s The Swans of Fifth Avenue, an exploration of Capote’s relationship with Babe Paley and her tight-knit circle of society women in the time before the Esquire story that brought it all crashing down.

When Rachel Flood sneaks back into her small town to make amends for things she did nine years ago, no one wants to hear it. Not even her mother. But a local boy named Jake might just be able to help. The Flood Girls is a quirky story about redemption.

Imagine if, in the roaring '20s, alcohol wasn’t the only thing that was banned — what if magic and sorcery were also illegal? A Criminal Magic envisions a world where magic is performed in secret and DC’s magical underworld is booming. When a sorcerer and a federal agent cross paths, they become involved in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

Literary legend M. M. “Mimi” Banning has been a recluse for years. But after losing all of her money, she’ll need to write another book for the first time in decades. In Be Frank With Me, Alice Whitley is assigned by Mimi’s publisher to monitor the book’s progress. But when Alice arrives, she finds herself put in charge of Mimi’s eccentric 9-year-old son, Frank.

This gorgeous second novel by Aidan Donnelley Rowley centers on three different people in Manhattan in the week leading up to Thanksgiving weekend. All lost in their own ways, they will each need to face their pasts before moving on with their futures. Sprinkled with beautiful literary references throughout, The Ramblers is a must read for bibliophiles.

Stay-at-home mommy Felicia Lyons thinks her biggest problem is the “witching hour” — that time between pickup and bedtime, when the kids are cranky and exhausted, when dinner needs to get made, when baths have to be given, when kids must be put to bed. But an unexpected phone call turns everything around in Second House From the Corner, threatening to upend her happy life and expose the dark secrets of her past.

When bar owner Karl finds a time-travelling wormhole in his closet, he does what any music-obsessed guy would do: he starts a side business with his best friend, Wayne, selling time travel to those who want to go back in time to listen to their favorite bands. But when Wayne gets transported to the wrong time, Karl enlists the help of astrophysicist Lena Geduldig, who has her own ideas of what to do with time travel. Every Anxious Wave questions if changing the past will impact their futures.

When newly engaged Annie begins to question her mother about who her father is, it leads her to a book about the infamous Duchess of Marlborough. In I'll See You in Paris, Annie’s quest to understand the Duchess — and her own history — takes her to a hamlet in the English countryside, a decaying estate, and finally, Paris.

Paula Vauss breaks away from her free-spirited storyteller mother, Kai, and reinvents herself as a tenacious divorce attorney living in Atlanta. But when a mysterious note lands on her doorstep, Paula embarks on a journey that will take her back to the past she tried to escape. The Opposite of Everyone is a bittersweet, poignant story about the power of love and the power of stories told with Jackson’s trademark Southern wit.

Jean’s husband was accused of a horrific crime — the kidnapping of a 2-year-old girl — and Jean was a devoted wife throughout the ordeal. But now, in The Widow, Jean’s husband has died. And she no longer has to play the role of the perfect wife. What did Jean know? What will Jean tell?

The married women in town have a problem: their husbands want too much sex. The divorcees in town have a very different problem: they’re not getting enough sex. When married Nancy and divorced Lucy devise a scheme for the divorcees in town to start having sex with the husbands so that the wives don’t have to, everything works out great — until it doesn’t. Nookietown is a laugh-out-loud story about marriage, fidelity, and honesty.

When her drinking problem causes Helen to lose her husband and custody of her son, she has nowhere to turn. In Under the Influence, the Havillands, connected philanthropists, take Helen under their wing and offer her support, friendship, and even the influence to get back custody of her son. But at what cost?

In 1855, when women did not travel unescorted, could not sit down in a bar, and certainly could not carry a gun, Lucy Lobdell cut off her hair and ran away in men’s clothing. Lucy becomes Joseph and lives life as a man, enjoying the new opportunities that come with being a man. The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell is based on a true story.