Best Thanksgiving Books for Adults

Book Summary

Celia Fairchild, who writes a NYC advice column, seems to have answers for everyone’s problems but her own. She dreamed of a family of her own before her marriage ended, but she gets a second chance when a young woman considers Celia to adopt her baby. Celia is eager to prove that she’s perfect mother material with a stable home and income – then she loses her job.

Celia still has one option left – selling the house in Charleston that she recently inherited from her estranged Aunt Calpurnia. But when she arrives in Charleston, she learns that her aunt was a hoarder and there’s no way she can sell the house without major cleanup and renovations. To pull it off, she’ll have to lean on old friends, new neighbors, and an unlikely sisterhood of strong, creative women.

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 call 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 reaches further than she expected.

Book Summary

They say you shouldn’t talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner, but in 2016, that was especially hard to avoid. After the conversation escalated to a political fight, Rhys wound up punching his son-in-law. Horrified by his own actions, as well as the state of the world around him, Rhys chucked his smartphone out of the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Seven years later, his grandchildren, whom he barely recognizes, show up on his doorstep seeking help. Their mom has disappeared, and they need a refuge away from their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. His home, with no electricity or indoor plumbing, is hardly a place for kids, but he would do anything to protect them.

When the militia members show up and kidnap the children, Rhys has no choice but to reenter the world. With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, he heads up a madcap journey through the rubble of his old life in hopes of saving his grandchildren.

Book Summary

The Briar Club begins with a murder on Thanksgiving in 1954.

Briarwood House is an all-female boardinghouse in Washington DC, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. It’s 1950 when the mysterious widow Grace moves into the attic. She throws attic-room dinner parties for her new friends, including a beautiful English wife and mother, a police officer’s daughter who is involved with a gangster, a baseball star frustrated with the end of the female league after WW2, and a woman who threw herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. 

While Grace’s dinner parties are healing to the women, she also has her own secrets…and there may be an enemy within the group. 

Book Summary

Set during Thanksgiving week of 1962, this novel tells the story of a family torn apart by secrets.

Macey was just nine years old when her mom put her on a bus to her grandma’s far away and told her to wait at the station to be picked up.

Her grandma is keeping secrets from her mama. Her mom keeps secrets from her. And her father is so lost in the memories of the Korean War that he even keeps secrets from himself.

Now Macey has a terrible secret of her own. Is this a secret she is meant to keep, or one she should tell?

Book Summary

This novel follows four Mexican-American cousins through a year of ups and downs with their careers, love lives, and relationships with each other.

As children, the cousins are very close – sharing secrets, traditions, and a fierce love for their abuelita. But the divorce of Mari’s parents separates the girls for the first time. Fifteen years later, they each have their own adult problems. While their lives have been separate for over a decade, they reunite at a Thanksgiving dinner after a devastating loss.

Book Summary

After years of struggling to make it as a writer, James has finally sold his first book – a semi-autobiographical novel about his dysfunctional relationship with his mother. He’s shocked to find out that the editor who has purchased his book is none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

After an embarrassing initial meeting, James and Mrs. Onassis, as she’s known around the office, form an unexpected friendship. As work on the book progresses, Jackie suggests the only way to get the ending of the book right is for James to spend time with his own mother. And that’s where Thanksgiving comes in!

By the time his book is finally published, his relationship with his editor has changed him as a writer and as a son.

Book Summary

This Pulitzer finalist was initially published in 1985 and became a popular movie in 1988. The fact that it’s still easily accessible in reprint over 30 years later is telling!

Travel writer Macon Leary is not what you’d expect a travel writer to be. He hates anything outside the norm and away from his home, including travel. Things get even worse after his wife leaves him. Macon intends to remain isolated and alone at home. Then, a peculiar dog trainer works her way into his life and helps him re-engage with life. Thanksgiving happens in Chapter 10, including planning for the day and the big dinner.

Anne Tyler also authored another book – A Patchwork Planet – that includes a dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner.

Book Summary

This literary satire takes place during a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day football game. SPC Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old, silver-star-recipient, and seven other members of the Bravo company are to be honored at halftime for their service in the Iraq War. These surviving Bravo members were sent on a promotional “victory tour” after an embedded news crew caught their last hellish battle in Iraq on video. But their return home is temporary; they’ll soon be back in Iraq.

The book examines the significant national divide between the war at home and the war abroad. The festive environment, including a performance by Destiny’s Child, doesn’t stop introspective Billy from considering America and its values.

Book Summary

Sarah suspects that some of the bad decisions she has made may actually be good decisions in disguise. After forwarding an inappropriate email to her entire company, she’s now jobless and has plenty of time to visit her sister, Mackie, in Houston for Thanksgiving.

When she arrives, Mackie has her own problems; she’s planning on selling everything she bought for her baby nursery after years of infertility. But this gives Sarah an idea that could fix everyone’s problems! Can the younger sister save the day and change her own luck along the way?

Book Summary

Fifth-generation cider-maker Sanna is devoted to her family’s struggling orchard. However, her brother is pushing their father to sell the land.

Single dad Isaac packed up his son Sebastian and headed across the country to keep him safe. When chance leads him to Sanna’s orchard, his help with the apple trees becomes essential, and it feels more like fate that he arrived when he did.

However, Isaac and Sebastian’s arrival also complicates Sanna’s life, especially when an outside threat comes to the farm.

Book Summary

Charlotte was widowed last year, and each day feels just as hard as the first. After the loss of her husband, she’s struggling to get out of bed each day, let alone keep up with the demands of her busy Martha’s Vineyard wedding planning business that she runs with the help of her 14-year-old daughter.

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, Charlotte is asked to plan a multi-million-dollar celebrity wedding… and fast! It’s the kind of wedding that will get major press and could really put her business on the map. But with much of her normal staff off the island for the winter, can she pull it together in time?

Somewhere between Thanksgiving dinner and the cake-cutting on Saturday night, she just might find a new love of her own.

Book Summary

Penelope is a romance writer with a passion for astrology. She’s estranged from her family, but reluctantly travels home for Thanksgiving, hoping to make amends. She gave up on fitting in with her high-achieving family years ago, but when her new business venture—a romance bookstore—is at risk of closing before its doors have opened, she’s forced to ask for help from the one place she never expected.

While Penelope has mentally prepared for a typical Thanksgiving with her difficult family, she does not expect her ex-husband to re-enter her life. She only has four days to repair her family relationships, save the bookstore, and create her own happily ever after.

Book Summary

Stella is the first-ever head of holidays for Hanover’s Department Store, which includes oversight of twenty-six ‘Home for the Holidays’-themed Christmas windows. On Thanksgiving Day in 1942, just 48 hours before the windows were supposed to be unveiled to the public, her lead window designer quit.

It’s up to Stella to gather a rag-tag team of store employees to finish the job, including their picky luxury stylist, two flirtatious personal shoppers, a handful of delivery boys, and Stella’s best pal, Hector. When she discovers that Hector is newly single, she finds old feelings are trying to distract her from the task at hand.

Book Summary

This is the final book in J. Sterlings’ Fun for the Holidays series, which features a rom-com novella for each month of the year.

Skye, a flight attendant, was warned to stay away from River as soon as she started her job at the airline because he’s a cocky pilot with a reputation for breaking hearts. But when a Thanksgiving snowstorm grounds them in a small mountain town, they are forced into unexpected proximity.

Far from their families this season, what begins as irritation over shared meals and holiday chaos soon shifts into undeniable chemistry. The holiday spirit has Skye starting to question everything she thought she knew about River.

Book Summary

If you’ve read any of the Stephanie Plum series, you know that Janet Evanovich specializes in adding laugh-out-loud, over-the-top situations to daily life. In this quick read, the main characters have the ultimate meet-cute when a rabbit begins chewing on the bottom of Megan’s skirt. She’s ready to yell at the rabbit’s owner, but quickly changes her mood when she finds out he’s a handsome doctor.