It’s officially the Christmas season and what better way to relax than settle in with a festive book. To give you some inspiration, members of The Bookseller news team have given their recommendations for their favourite festive, Christmas or just generally winter-themed books.
From a murder mystery, to a small-town romance and to historical fantasy, there is bound to be something for everyone in our picks.
Maia Snow, news editor
My pick
The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley (HarperCollins, 2019)
What’s it about?
The story follows a group of seven friends who spend New Year’s Eve in the Scottish Highlands at a hunting lodge. By the end, one winds up dead changing all of their lives forever.
Why I love it
On the surface this book does not scream “cosy Christmas” – but it is set on New Year’s Eve, so technically it is festive. The novel follows a group of friends on a NYE trip to a remote cabin in the Scotland Highlands. What could go wrong? Well, one of them dies, that’s what. I remember reading this and being hooked from the off. Foley’s plotting is brilliant, and the setting and the characters make it the perfect murder mystery – and if you’re mildly opposed to the constant forced cosiness and joy of Christmas, this is a good antidote to that.
Molly Openshaw, social media executive
My pick
Any of Sarah Morgan’s festive books (HarperCollins). Special mention to The Christmas Escape (2021) and The Christmas Cottage (2024)
What are they about?
The Christmas Escape follows Christy Sullivan as she tries to save her marriage on a trip to Lapland with her husband, his best friend, their child and her best friend. However, on the trip long-held secrets unravel and unexpected romance shines under the Northern Lights. The Christmas Cottage follows events organiser Imogen, who is hiding painful truths about her past. After making a mistake at work, she settles into an idyllic cottage where she has been invited to spend Christmas, but secrets and unwanted faces from the past resurface, and Imogen’s new peace is threatened.
Why I love it
Every year Sarah Morgan releases a festive book, typically surrounding family, identity and romance, set among wonderful wintery backdrops from the Scottish Highlands to Lapland. It has become my yearly tradition to read her latest release at Christmastime, because they’re always a delight. Heartwarming and cosy, I would recommend them to anyone seeking some Christmassy escapism!
Katie Fraser, staff writer
My pick
The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden (Century)
What’s it about?
Set across two timelines, The Warm Hands of Ghosts follows Canadian nurse Laura in 1918 as she returns to the Western Front to discover what happened with her brother Freddie, declared missing in action. In alternating chapters, we stay with Laura as she works in a hospital near the Front, treating soldiers and searching for her brother, and we follow Freddie in the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele, 1917. Irreconcilably traumatised by the war and caught up in a wave of confusion at the field hospital, Freddie runs into the malevolent musician Faland. This man is no mere musician, he is the Devil who feeds off the memories of soldiers and transforms them into music. To bring Freddie back from Faland’s cursed labyrinthine realm and the darkness of his own mind, Laura must confront the mysterious fiddler and her own trauma.
Why I love it
This novel is exquisite. I read it earlier in the year and think about it constantly. When asked to pick a festive read, Arden’s novel came to mind because – ultimately – it is about kinship, about the people in our lives that save us from ourselves and the darkness of the world around us. At a time when many people are returning to their homes for Christmas and the holidays, this is a message worth remembering.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts shows humanity in an inhuman landscape. A landscape where people must shut down a part of themselves that emotionally defines them. Freddie is lured by Faland because he offers oblivion, the chance for his memories to be taken away, for the pain to be taken away but, in taking the pain, Faland cannibalises the very essence of Freddie’s character. Laura approaches everything like a medical problem – clinical and to the point. In my interview with Arden she told me: “Getting Laura on the page was in part about how much emotion of hers to put down because she’s not feeling her feelings either. No one is. You can’t be. People turn that off in these situations.”
This is my book of the year. At a time where the world appears to be perpetually filled with war and hate, it is worth remembering that no one exists in isolation. “The blessed forget and the damned remember,” Arden writes. It is worth remembering that, in Arden’s words, it is “that people save us”.
