Cozy Books to Read in the Fall of 2025

Book Summary

New York architect Tate Donovan has recently been discharged from a psychiatric facility after battling acute depression and mourning the loss of his sister. On her deathbed, his sister revealed that she could see spirits still tethered to the living. She says it’s a gift that runs in their family, but Tate is struggling to accept it because it defies rational explanation.

Searching for a fresh start, he travels to Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home. Taking up residence in a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, Tate meets Wren. They have an immediate connection, but he senses a darkness lurking behind her small-town facade. Tate is determined to unravel Wren’s past before time runs out.

Book Summary

Set over the course of one year at a New England boarding school, the mother-daughter writing duo of Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham introduces readers to an intertwined cast of characters inspired by Shelby’s lived experience attending a fancy boarding school in Rhode Island. Elin wrote the adult perspectives for the book (parents and teachers), while Shelby wrote key scenes from the student perspectives.

As students move in for the fall semester, America Today releases the newest rankings, and Tiffin Academy just jumped seventeen spots to number. But how can that be when the dorms need to be renovated, the sports teams never win, and the students excel far more in their social lives than in their academics? On the other hand, Tiffin does boast a beautiful campus, small class sizes, and an acclaimed New York chef running the dining hall.

But something strange is definitely going on. One by one, scandalous items begin appearing on phones across the campus thanks to the new ZipZap app. It appears that everyone has something to hide – students and staff alike, from international influencer Davi and resident queen bee Simone, to the young new history teacher and even the admissions director.

Book Summary

Margaret and her husband Thomas arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1646, eager to build a life in the New World with a child on the way. However, Margaret’s fiery personality is not well-regarded in the Puritan community. Soon, she is considered cunning and dangerous.

The unjust accusations even begin to affect the previously passionate and unbreakable love she shared with Thomas. Can their marriage survive Margaret’s trial for witchcraft?

Book Summary

Thirty-two-year-old Henrietta once wanted to be a librarian, but now her work transcribing life stories for terminally ill patients is the perfect distraction from her own past. It typically allows her to separate fact from emotion, but when Henrietta meets 60-something Annie, who is both eccentric and terminally ill, she feels herself being drawn into Annie’s story.

When Annie reveals her sister’s mysterious drowning back in 1974, Henrietta begins methodically following the story’s loose ends. Annie, on the other hand, has long been afraid to look too closely into her murky memories of that terrible night. The push and pull between these two women will unearth a surprising emotional connection between them before it’s too late.

Book Summary

All the Colors of the Dark crosses genres from literary fiction to mystery and even to romance as it follows the characters from their teen years in 1975 into adulthood.

In the small Ozarks town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family, Misty, is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy with one eye. Patch saves the girl, but this leaves heartache in his wake.

While Mont Clare was once a close-knit community, after this event, the town will never be the same. The trauma experienced by Patch, his friend Saint, and Misty will haunt them as they grow into adulthood. The trauma causes each character to make choices you may not agree with, creating many twists and a suspenseful vibe throughout the compelling story.

Book Summary

Vale has long searched for a sense of belonging, and at twenty-nine, she was starting to hit her stride in the Pittsburgh bar she opened with her father, Bo. However, when the bar has a fire and she learns the insurance hasn’t been paid, she’s back to square one.

Her grandmother, Iris, lets Vale return to her home in Philadelphia. However, she learns that her half-sister, Blythe, has already moved into the guest room amidst problems in her marriage. Everyone in the family brings their own complications, including Vale’s mother, Audrey, whom she hasn’t seen in years. This poignant novel is about family secrets, healing, and the hope of second chances.

Book Summary

While this book takes place on September 11, 2001 and the following days, it’s not the constantly devastating story you would expect. Instead, this heartwarming book recounts the experiences of countless passengers from some of the 38 planes that were unexpectedly diverted to Newfoundland – an island in Canada’s easternmost province – when US airspace was closed on 9/11. On that day, the small town of Gander, with a population of just 10,000, received more than 6,600 passengers from 92 countries. Ganderites, along with residents of the surrounding towns, opened the doors to the local churches, schools, and even their own homes.

Throughout this book, you’ll not only learn the personal stories of the passengers, but you’ll also learn a lot about life on this tiny, remote island and about the unexpected hosts who welcomed strangers from around the world with open arms and generous hearts.

Book Summary

Thirty-two-year-old Penelope has had enough of her overbearing mother, her married boyfriend, and her sexist boss. Her life needs a reset, so Pen picks up and moves from Minnesota to Tennessee to open her own financial business.

Once in Nashville, Pen meets brother and sister, Deanna and Grant. Despite the siblings’ best efforts, socially anxious Pen is reluctant to come out of her shell. She slowly opens up to a friendship with Deanna, and after joining Grant’s cycling group, it’s clear that something is blossoming between the two of them. But Pen is determined to ignore her feelings for Grant.

Book Summary

Charlotte escaped from the White Oaks tobacco plantation in Maryland and made her way north to Pennsylvania. At the plantation, she was enslaved as a housemaid, and she expected freedom to feel different. But in Philadelphia, she acts as a servant to her white-passing father. The two of them must be very careful to hide their identities from the slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.

Charlotte can finally begin to envision a different future for herself after she befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from a very wealthy Black family.

When Evie, a friend from White Oaks is brought to Philadelphia by the plantation mistress, what is Charlotte willing to risk to help her escape? Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue Evie, but with the city embroiled in race riots, their fight for Evie’s freedom could end up costing them their own.

Book Summary

Looking for an eerie mystery that’s perfect for book lovers wanting to read something a bit haunting around Halloween?

This highly-rated debut novel follows a bookshop employee named Lydia, who ends up investigating the suicide of one of her bookshop regulars. As Lydia delves into his past, she also uncovers a buried memory from her own violent childhood.

This is a twisty crime thriller with a very creative puzzle element that will keep readers guessing.

Book Summary

Historical fiction meets magic and fantasy in this unique novel from the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

The story centers around the Eastwood sisters – Juniper, Agnes, and Bella. They’ve been estranged from one another for most of their lives. But on the day of the equinox in 1893, the sisters all find themselves at the same suffragist rally in New Salem. Reunited, the sisters now fight for women’s rights, as well as the right to practice witchcraft.

Intermixed within this historical fantasy are a few well-known, real-life historical women from the Suffrage Movement, which lends a layer of realism to the fantasy elements.

Book Summary

Harper is a young author with one major best-seller under her belt, but now she’s in need of a career comeback. At the suggestion of her agent, she rents a house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Hiding her author identity from everyone she meets, Harper seeks to draw inspiration for a new novel about women in the suburbs.

Soon Harper befriends her empty-nester neighbor. It’s October, and Wendy’s son just moved away for college. She’s struggling with being all alone. But not just because she misses her son. Wendy is keeping a secret of her own – her struggle with kleptomania.

Book Summary

Ellie thought her career as a high-end event planner was going perfectly until she hit the worst twelve-hour period of her life. One night, her live-in boyfriend breaks up with her out of nowhere, and then the next morning, her boss fires her. Before she can begin to decide on the next steps, she gets a call from her mom asking if she’d be willing to come home and help plan their upcoming Harvest Festival. Her mom is shocked, but thrilled, when Ellie agrees.

She grew up at her parents’ inn, which is located on their friend’s idyllic apple orchard. The whole place is magical in the autumn, so the Harvest Festival is a great idea. But what Ellie didn’t know is that her childhood friend, Aiden, would be involved. And somehow her mom never mentioned that grown-up Aiden is VERY attractive.

Book Summary

In Depression-era Kentucky, Del is the wife of the most celebrated preacher in Harlan County. She tries to lay low in her rigid life but can’t keep the status quo amid her husband’s infidelity. When a coal train comes through town, Del bravely jumps aboard in what she sees as her only chance for freedom.

As she travels across the country, she finds a new community among the other transient outcasts. Nomadic single mom Louisa quickly befriends Del and helps her learn how to live life on the rails. But the Depression is taking its toll, and desperate circumstances threaten their close bond.

Book Summary

While Petra’s husband is off fighting at World War I’s eastern front, she spends her nights roaming the city with her camera. Petra was born a witch, and she discovers that she can capture the souls of the dead on film. When Josef Svoboda begins recruiting a team of sorcerers to infiltrate the front lines, Petra’s supernatural skills do not go unnoticed. He needs her unique abilities to help identify the most dangerous enemy of all – the undead.

Venturing deep in the cursed Carpathian Mountains, the horrors Petra photographs are beyond anything she could have imagined. She wants to turn back, but not before she discovers her husband’s fate.

Book Summary

Jen is waiting up for her 17-year-old son to come home one night in late October. Through the window, she witnesses the unthinkable. Her son kills a man right there in the street outside their home and is taken into custody.

She goes to sleep that night, wishing it was all just a bad dream, and then she wakes up yesterday. The next day, she wakes up the day before yesterday.

Day after day, she wakes up another day earlier and has another opportunity to stop the murder if only she can figure out what caused her son to commit the crime in the first place.

Book Summary

September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries…and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she’s made.

September 2011. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, which was the same day a stranger reached out and saved her. But a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf may open Taryn’s eyes to the larger forces at work in her life.

Book Summary

This book weaves together a haunting tale of past and present. In 1850 Massachusetts, Whittaker House was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Sadly, some people seeking freedom didn’t make it out alive – including Little Annie and Clementine.

More than a century and a half later, Whittaker House is now a vacation rental in the Berkshires. But many of those who visit the house are not there merely as tourists – they are contemporary Black women struggling to reconcile the legacy of slavery.

This haunted story is described as the perfect mix of history and paranormal suspense.

Book Summary

Eliza is a suburban wife secretly struggling with a new, intense fear of leaving her house. She forces herself to go to the store in preparation for a visit from her college-age children. While there, she hears younger moms talking about a new local online forum for women. Eliza has run a similar group for years, but these strangers are calling her original group boring.

In a moment of desperation and weakness, Eliza starts a rumor about a new neighbor on her board to liven it up. But soon, the rumor has reached further than she expected.

Book Summary

It’s October, the temperatures are dropping, and the leaves are changing in North Carolina. Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. She loves the way her specialty products heal others, but along the way, she’s losing herself.

Sydney Waverley has also lost balance in her life as she’s become singularly focused on having a baby. When a mysterious stranger shows up and challenges the very heart of the Waverly family, each of them must make choices they have never confronted before. Along the way, romance is in the air.

Book Summary

Weyward weaves together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, using a bit of magical realism along the way.

In 1619, Altha is awaiting trial after being accused of using witchcraft to murder a local farmer. She knows that she’ll need to use all her deep knowledge of the natural world if she wants to remain free.

In 1942, the world is at war. Violet longs for the education her brother receives in their grandfather’s crumbling estate, but as a girl, she’s not entitled to knowledge. Her mother was rumored to have gone mad, and the only connection Violet has to her is a locket and the word Weyward carved into the wooden floor.

In 2019, Kate is fleeing London in the dark and heading to Weyward Cottage. She inherited the ramshackle home with its overgrown garden from an aunt she barely knew. It’s given her the much-needed opportunity to escape her abusive boyfriend. However, she doesn’t know that the cottage has secrets dating back to the witch-hunts of the 17th century.

Book Summary

When a Vietnam POW returns home, he carries new anger and impulsiveness. Determined to stand by her husband, his wife agrees with his plan to move his family to Alaska to live off the grid. Soon after arriving, the harsh reality of rural Alaska sets in for 13-year-old Leni and her mom.

For a while, things were better with her dad as they spent the fall season preparing for their first Alaskan winter, but she feared his more balanced self was only temporary.

Book Summary

The Mitchell triplets, Mirabel, Monday, and Mab, live in a small town with a terrible past of water-quality issues, which have led to numerous health issues.

Because the town has spent years in the national news, everyone is shocked when a new family decides to move in. When the family’s past connection to the town is revealed, it affects everyone, including all three sisters.

Book Summary

Ashlyn Greer is a rare-book dealer who loves the smell of old paper, ink, and leather. Old volumes appeal to all of her senses, including a sense the rest of us don’t have. She is gifted with the unique ability to feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners.

When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound, unpublished volumes with no evidence of how they came to be, she gets wrapped up in a decades-old literary mystery. Each volume bears a curious inscription, as well as the emotional fingerprints of the authors, Hemi and Belle. The books tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the closer she comes to bringing closure to their love story, and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

Book Summary

When Annie’s 20+ year marriage ends suddenly, leaving her single for the first time in her adult life at age 44, she’s not sure how to start over. Her kids are grown, and there’s nothing keeping her in the city where she and her ex-husband were successful restaurateurs. So, she answers an ad for a temporary position as a winter caretaker of a historic home in the small English seaside community of Willow Bay. This decision turns out to be even more impactful than she expected.

Annie is immediately charmed by the house, and the quirky but friendly villagers welcome her with open arms. All except the grumpy nephew of the home’s owner, who sees her as a roadblock to his plans. But as fall turns to winter, Annie begins to formulate her own plan for the next season of her life. 

Book Summary

This is a story of tarot cards and the way they impacted the dynamic female friendship between two now-revered real-life painters, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Both women began their careers as a muse for a man, but managed to become icons in their own right.

Remedios and her lover, a poet named Benjamin Peret, fled from the Nazis in Paris for Villa Air Bel, a safe house for artists on the Riviera. Along with Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and others, the two anxiously waited for exit papers to travel outside Europe. However, the longer they stay at the house, the more Remedios realizes that the others don’t see her as an artist, just as Benjamin’s beautiful inspiration. She begins to find refuge in a mysterious bookshop, where she stumbles into the world of tarot.

When Remedios and Benjamin finally receive the paperwork to travel, they head to Mexico and are reunited with fellow painter Leonora Carrington. Together, the women tap their creativity, stake their independence, and each finds their true loves. Tarot helps them discover their true subconscious and achieve success as Surrealist painters.

Book Summary

This psychological thriller features two strong female main characters who attempt to unravel a murder. Julia is helping her daughter Cora move into her new college dorm. While she is on campus with Cora, a tragic shooting occurs. Julie is able to get her daughter to safety, but she’s not sure if this was a random act.

Ren is an assassin and soon-to-be mother. Her husband, Nolan, is also an assassin, but they live by a strict set of rules. They only target the guilty while remaining dedicated to protecting the innocent and their own family. However, Nolan went rogue for his last assignment.

The story is told in the alternating viewpoints of Julia and Ren as they try to figure out who ordered the assassination at the college, and why.

Book Summary

The black-and-white striped tents appear overnight. There are no announcements or advertisements, and the circus- with its breathtaking amazement – is only open at night.

Two young magicians – Celia and Marco – have been trained since childhood by their two mentors. The Night Circus is the stage on which the two will compete for superiority, using all the powers they have been perfecting over the years.