Book Club Books for Christmas

Book Summary

Nineteen-year-old Marion’s dreams come true when she’s cast as a member of the Rockettes, Radio City Music Hall’s precision dance troupe. It’s an honor for any dancer to be selected for the role and given the opportunity to perform at the Art Deco masterpiece of a theater that is Radio City. But Marion soon learns that, behind the scenes, the days are long and the rehearsals grueling.

One night, in 1956, a bomb explodes in the theater. It’s suspected to be the work of the infamous “Big Apple Bomber” who has been planting bombs in crowded places around the city for the past sixteen years. The police still have no leads, leaving citizens living in fear. At Marion’s urging, the police agree to try psychological profiling, a radical new technique at the time.

While the Rockettes are trained to stay in line, Marion realizes that to help catch the bomber, she’ll have to stand out.

Book Summary

Mel is a wedding singer who has always enjoyed the magic of the holidays. Her mother, Connie, always made the season special and pulled off amazing feats that kept Mel believing in Santa long after her peers. Unfortunately, this awesome parenting was not the norm throughout the year. Connie struggled with alcoholism, making childhood unpredictable for Mel.

Now, just two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call that her mother has passed away. Shortly after, a woman claiming to be Connie’s estranged best friend, Barb, shows up full of stories about Connie’s past. Barb gives Mel the opportunity to join her family for Christmas so she won’t be alone. The visit leaves Mel reckoning with how little she knew about her mother’s past while reexamining her own future. She’s also being drawn to Connie’s almost divorced son.

Book Summary

Darcy recently broke up with a cheating boyfriend, and her friends are determined to set her up with a perfect blind date. But she’s too busy pursuing her PhD in Copenhagen and determined not to be distracted by a broken heart.

When an unknown portrait by Denmark’s greatest painter is discovered beneath another masterpiece, Darcy is tasked with uncovering the identity of the woman in the painting. Her research brings her into contact with some of the most powerful figures in the art world, including Max – the blind date.

She can’t deny the instant attraction, but she’s determined to keep things professional. Then a discovery threatens to put her and Max on opposite sides forever.

Book Summary

Spanning four Christmas from 1914-1918, you’ll meet Evie, her brother Will, and his best friend Thomas. The boys are soon facing the front lines of World War 1, while Evie tries to help the effort from home. The compelling novel is told in epistolary form (through letters).

Book Summary

Riley certainly didn’t plan to lose her job right before Christmas, but it does free her up to return home to Cape Cod to help at the family inn when her mother breaks her leg. The cozy winter setting immediately begins to lift her spirits, and she realizes just how much she’s been missing her family.

This holiday season, the inn’s guests include Franny, a woman who recently lost a sister. Her sister left her four letters to open to help her experience the Cape. And then there’s Aidan, Riley’s high school sweetheart. Now a widower, Aidan is staying at the inn with his 9-year-old son Luke.

Book Summary

Promising physics student Megs is attending Oxford in 1950 and prefers facts to creativity. However, her beloved but critically ill, 8-year-old brother is obsessed with a world created in a book – The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. When he asks her to find out where Narnia came from, she can’t refuse his plea.

When she tracks down the Lewis brothers, who are also at Oxford, they graciously invite her for tea. While they fill her with stories she can pass along to her brother, she doesn’t understand why he won’t answer her most important question about the origin of Narnia.

Book Summary

Hannah lost her parents at a young age, and Finn’s family disowned him when he came out. With nowhere else to go, these two Christmas orphans have spent the holiday together every year since their years at Boston College. After school, both moved to NYC, where they added stylish Priya and mysterious Theo to their found family.

Thanks to offbeat adventures that get a bit more outrageous each year, their Christmases are anything but traditional. But when Finn announces plans to move to LA, the group realizes this holiday might be their last together.

Book Summary

Augustus owns the North’s Novelties and Curios shop, which has been passed down in his family since 1740. When he dies at the age of 96, he leaves an unusual will behind for his adult daughters, who each have a different mother. The estranged half-sisters Maggie, Simone, and Star are given a series of challenges in the will, which require them to work together.

Once they’ve finished the smaller challenges, they must bring back the village’s Winter Solstice celebration, a tradition that has lapsed in recent years. Along the way, these 30 & 40-something sisters run into some unexpected romance.

Book Summary

At the Sullivan’s Harlem brownstone, Christmas doesn’t exist. The family has suffered a devasting loss, so this year, there are no Christmas trees, cookies, gifts, or invited guests.

But then, guests & gifts related to the twelve days of Christmas begin arriving. The happenings in the book follow the classic 12 Days of Christmas song.

Book Summary

Maryam is on her way to her sister’s impromptu wedding, and Anna is headed to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy family. These two strangers are seatmates on a flight to Toronto when they find themselves in extreme turbulence. The scary flight causes the two women to confess their deepest hopes and fears to each other.

They think they’ll never see each other again, but the rough ride leads to an emergency landing in Ottawa. Instead of making it to Toronto, the duo (along with Maryam’s sister’s entire bridal party and Saif, the love of Maryam’s life) find themselves at the quirky Snow Falls Inn in a picture-perfect town. Could being snowbound in a small town unexpectedly turn into the best holiday ever?

Book Summary

When Maggie was 16 in 1996, she was sent to live with her aunt in Ocracoke, a remote village on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She was homesick until she met Bryce, one of the few other teens on the island. He taught her about all the wonders of the island while introducing her to photography.

In 2019, Maggie splits her time between running a successful gallery in New York and photographing remote locations around the world. However, as Christmas approaches she is struggling to come to terms with a sobering medical diagnosis. As she grows more dependant on her assistant, she also begins to tell him the story of another Christmas, decades earlier—and the love that set her on a course she never could have imagined.

Book Summary

Holly has been estranged from her family ever since a tragic New Year’s Eve car accident three years ago. During those years, she’s been part of a lonely-hearts holiday letter–writing club. Each December, Holly writes to a stranger who is also spending Christmas alone, and she receives a letter from another lonely person in return.

The letters are meant to be anonymous, allowing the sender to write anything on their heart. But this year, the letter Holly receives has clues that lead her to believe she can track down the author and maybe even reunite her with the grandson, Jack, whom she misses so dearly.

When Holly finds Jack, she realizes that she’s actually met him once before. There’s an immediate spark between the two of them, just like there was the first time. She’s determined to fix his family, and maybe even her own, but time is running out.

Book Summary

For years, Eva has buried herself in her work as a way to hide from the real world – the world in which her family was ripped apart on Christmas. The last thing she wants to do this holiday is to drive to Cornwall for a friend Hallie’s party, but her husband insists. To make matters worse, Hallie announces that she’s pregnant.

Overwhelmed by memories of the past, Eva tries to sneak back to London in the middle of the night. But when the clock strikes midnight, she is visited by the ghost of her grandmother, who warns her that if she doesn’t stop pushing her loved ones away, she’ll lose them forever.

She wakes up on Christmas morning to find that she’s no longer in her own life but rather that of her assistant, Diana. The next day, she wakes to another Christmas morning, but this time in the body of her sister, Natalie. Again and again, she relives Christmas through the eyes of another person she’s been pushing away. Not only does Eva discover the secret struggles that her loved ones have been hiding, she also learns lessons about her own life along the way.

Book Summary

This heartwarming novel brings the magic of Christmas and is also a testament to the power of second chances!

Ivy Perkins is recently divorced and is looking to make a big change in her life. So, she buys an old farmhouse sight unseen. Ivy knows it will be a labor of love… but it might be more labor than she counted on.

As she sorts through all the junk the prior owners left behind, she comes across a beautiful, decades-old Santa suit. Tucked in the pocket is a handwritten note from a little girl whose Christmas wish was for her father to return home from the war. Ivy’s desire to learn more about the note’s author draws her into her new community and may even result in a second chance at love.

Book Summary

What if you could have one more day with someone you lost? That’s the underlying premise of this novel that blends It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day into a compelling holiday read.

Diana is no longer looking forward to Christmas. Her fiance, Linus, was critically injured in a bike accident, and she’s losing hope that he’ll ever open his eyes again. The night before Christmas Eve, she finds a hidden snow globe of their small town and realizes that Linus bought it for her before the accident. The next day should have been Christmas Eve, but instead, Diana wakes up on December 4th, the day of the accident.

She soon realizes that she’s in a loop of that day, each time experiencing a different variation of events. Along the way, she uncovers startling truths about herself, her relationship, and even her career.

Book Summary

This unexpected Christmas novel explores a family’s first holiday season after a big loss. Sisters Romy and Joanna are returning home to the Dublin Mountain foothills from their very different lives in London and Silicon Valley. Romy feels adrift on the lower rungs of her career ladder, while Joanna has a high-powered career, but isn’t sure if that life is the right way to raise her twin daughters.

Back home, the house feels empty without their mom. Dad feels like a passing shadow, and their brother is brooding and silent. But then Romy discovers some words of wisdom left behind by their mom, Cathy. Can her loving reminder save the Christmas season?

Book Summary

On Christmas Eve sixty years ago, a delivery man made a gruesome discovery that forever changed the small town of Tambilla. In the present day, Jess is a journalist in London when she gets a call to return home to Australia to help with her grandmother, Nora. Nora was more like a mother to Jess, after Jess’s mother, Polly, left her with Nora and moved to Brisbane when Jess was only 10.

Nora fell in her attic while searching for something, and now she is mumbling about an event in her past in a way that is difficult to understand. As Jess tries to piece things together, she learns that Nora was agitated and restless even before the fall. She knows something is going on, and is determined to figure it out. She searches the house for clues and finds a true crime book about the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve.

But what does this cold case have to do with her family?

Book Summary

Henrietta (Henri) is a successful mergers and acquisitions executive, but the next generation of employees at the company are eager to replace her. Henri’s boss informs her that she’ll be out of work if she doesn’t close a big deal before the end of the year. Desperate to keep her job, Henri assures her boss that she can convince her parents to sell their iconic small-town Christmas store to a huge corporate client.

Henri typically only leaves her job in Detroit long enough for a quick, 24-hour holiday visit with her mom and dad. Imagine their surprise when she shows up at the family business in early December. Her parents are thrilled to see her, but her brother is immediately suspicious.

While she’s used to closing cold corporate deals, she finds herself reconnecting with the warmth of the family store and her hometown. Will she be able to close the deal and save her career even if it hurts her family?

Book Summary

Sabrina Post is a 26-year-old struggling writer who arrives at the Plaza Hotel to begin her next gig – ghost-writing a memoir for a famous art dealer. It’s a dream job – she gets her own suite and a big paycheck! Her week gets even more magical when she finds out the art dealer once worked for the author of the Eloise books, Kay Thompson.

Throw in a member of the British aristocracy that Sabrina meets at the hotel bar, and you have the perfect heartwarming holiday read!

Book Summary

In this 176-page novella, widowed Vera is lonely in her new condo as the holidays approach. A knock at the door introduces her to a young girl, Fiona. Fiona’s mom is seriously ill, and her dad is out of town.

Suddenly, Vera doesn’t have time to be lonely as she assembles an unexpected group of women to help make a Christmas quilt for Fiona’s mom. Artist Tasha, empty nester Beverly, and retired therapist Eleanor join in and form a new family of friends to help Fiona. But, they manage to help each other along the way.

Book Summary

On Christmas Eve, four estranged brothers have been called home by their widowed father. But, the reunion goes awry when there is a crash and scream after dinner. The family rushes upstairs to find their father dead with a slash in his throat.

Everyone seems to have an alibi, along with their own reasons for disliking the man. Hercule Poirot arrives to investigate, but the family is resistant to his help.

Book Summary

Like Charles Dicken’s Scrooge, seventeen-year-old Holly received a Christmas Eve visit from three ghosts who showed her how selfish and spoiled she’d become. Unlike Scrooge, she was unconvinced, and she did not change her ways. Then, she died.

She’s now stuck working for the top-secret company called Project Scrooge, where she serves as the new Ghost of Christmas Past. Each year she helps the company as they attempt to save another miserly grouch. Despite helping many people, she remains miserable – watching as her family and friends go on living while she stays frozen at seventeen, unable to interact with them. But the Scrooge she’s been assigned to help reform this year may change everything.

Book Summary

In 1972, Joan’s husband is determined to build her a beautiful dining room table before Thanksgiving dinner. While he works on the table, Joan works on her mother’s recipes, inspired to make a delicious meal. Their lives are interrupted when Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer.

In 2012, a pregnant Lauren finds an old table that has recently been refinished. When she gets home, she discovers handwritten recipe cards, complete with loving notes from a mother to her daughter. After being raised in foster care without that kind of relationship in her life, Lauren is moved by the card and wants to learn how to cook for her baby using the recipes. She’s drawn to the family on the cards and hopes to unlock the mystery of who they belong to before Christmas.

Book Summary

Looking for a very non-traditional Christmas read? Try this Christmas mystery thriller! Edward Holbeck was born into a highly eccentric, old-money family in the 1%. He left them behind to escape their control and forge his own path. His wife, Harry, is a novelist on the brink of stardom, and their life is good.

However, the family’s eyes and ears are everywhere. They’re not okay with Edward’s separation from the family because he’s still set to be the sole heir to the fortunes.

When the head of the family, Robert, slips a shocking taped confession to Harry, their world begins to spin. As she searches for the truth, she finds herself involved in the Holbeck’s savage Christmas tradition, even though she knows losing the game can be deadly.