Thanksgiving season has officially arrived and we are counting down the days until the holiday break when we can curl up with a gripping book and a pumpkin spice latte.
From heart-warming family gatherings and budding romances to chilling discoveries, we have rounded up twelve Thanksgiving scenarios to keep you entertained during this holiday season.
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
“When Macon Leary’s son is killed in a robbery, his life comes to an end. Frozen within himself he mechanically goes through the motions of living, but he is dead inside. Unable to give or take comfort from his wife, his marriage falls apart. He is left to live alone with his rituals and a vicious and uncontrolled dog, Edward. He pulls further and further into himself. When the dog hospital refuses to board Edward so Macon can travel to England to write another of his dreary guidebooks for business travelers who want to feel they never left home, he is forced to find an alternative. On impulse, he chooses the Meow-Bow Animal Hospital, where he meets Muriel, the dog trainer, and she turns his life upside-down. She is everything he isn’t: spontaneous, free, happy-go-lucky.
Rich in observation and free of the usual romance tropes, this delightful novel delights and entertains at every turn”-Kilian
Buy it on AmazonTwo Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O. Henry
In O. Henry’s “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen”, Stuffy Pete, a homeless New Yorker, always meets a kind older gentleman in Union Square on Thanksgiving who treats him to dinner. This year, Stuffy Pete is fed beforehand by two kindly ladies and he finds he has no appetite for a second dinner. Not wishing to disappoint the older man, Stuffy Pete must decide whether to dine again or decline. This heartwarming holiday story is a meditation on generosity with a classic O. Henry ironic twist at the end.
Read it Free HereOnly Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzalez
Will Tavares is the dream summer fling ― he’s fun, affectionate, kind ― but just when Ollie thinks he’s found his Happily Ever After, summer vacation ends and Will stops texting Ollie back. Now Ollie is one prince short of his fairy tale ending, and to complicate the fairy tale further, a family emergency sees Ollie uprooted and enrolled at a new school across the country. Which he minds a little less when he realizes it’s the same school Will goes to… except Ollie finds that the sweet guy he knew from summer isn’t the same one attending Collinswood High.
Ollie has no intention of pining after a guy who clearly isn’t ready for a relationship. But then Will starts “coincidentally” popping up in every area of Ollie’s life, from music class to the lunch table, and Ollie finds his resolve weakening.
The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff
“Does evil come from without or within us?”
This question resonates throughout this book by Award-winning screenwriter Alexandra Sokoloff.
While everyone else at Baird College rush out for their long Thanksgiving holiday, five students opted to stay for secret reasons. They stumbled upon each other in the deserted “manor hall” and made an unlikely bond. For laughs, they played with an Ouija board and was able to call on a presence who introduced himself as “Zachary”. It was all fun and games until things began happening. It started off as funny, then creepy, then full blown haunting. They try to figure out if they were being victims of a college prank or not.
Each of “Zachary’s” answers to their questions hit home one way or another in each of them. Little did they know that this simple contact was something more sinister.”- Camille Vargas
Buy it on AmazonOldtown Folks by Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Possibly a greater work of art than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Oldtown Folks gives a penetrating and panornamic view of life in a New England village in the years following the Revolutionary War, and before the coming of the railroad and the steam engine. This book is beautiful, filled with rich insights about people and very humorous. In gives a vivid portrait of the social life and thinking of the people in the era. Stowe wrote the book in an effort to preserve for future generations the life, which she had known growing up as a child and which she saw passing away under the force of industrialization. She succeeded marvelously.”-Eli Schotz
Read it Free Here Buy it on AmazonLease on Love by Falon Ballard
After getting passed over for an overdue—and much needed—promotion, Sadie Green is in desperate need of three things: a stiff drink, a new place to live, and a one-night-stand. When one drink turns into one too many, Sadie mixes up a long-ignored dating app for a roommate-finding app and finds herself on the doorstep of Jack Thomas’s gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone. Too bad she’s more attracted to his impressive real estate than she is to the man himself.
Jack, still grieving the unexpected death of his parents, has learned to find comfort in video games and movie marathons instead of friends. So while he doesn’t know just what to make of the vivaciously verbose Sadie, he’s willing to offer her his spare bedroom while she gets back on her feet. And with the rent unbeatably low, Sadie can finally pursue her floristry side hustle full-time. The two are polar opposites, but as Sadie’s presence begins to turn the brownstone into a home, they both start to realize they may have just made the deal of a lifetime.
Buy it on AmazonAn Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott
“The author of “Little Women” gives us a heartwarming, homey tale of the Basset family, who were “poor in money, but rich in love.” It’s Thanksgiving Day, and the kitchen is full of the bustle of food preparations. Unexpectedly, a neighbor comes by to tell Mrs. Basset that her mother is ill, so Mr. Basset drives her away in the sleigh. Though the parents don’t expect the children to prepare the Thanksgiving feast on their own, Tilly, the oldest, determines to give it a try. Things don’t go smoothly in the kitchen, and many dishes are smelling a little odd as they cook, when two sleighs arrive, chock full of relatives! Grandma, it turns out, is fine, and she and aunts and uncles have come to feast at the Bassets. Though Tilly is embarrassed at the parts of the meal that didn’t turn out too well, most is edible and much appreciated, and the home is filled with nourishing love and gratitude.”-K Childs
Read it Free Here Buy it on AmazonThe Ice Storm by Rick Moody
“A naturalistic portrait of life in the affluent Connecticut suburb of New Canaan in 1973. Focused on two families, the Hoods and the Williams, during a Thanksgiving ice storm, the events that unfold involve ennui, sexual experimentation, and tragedy, as characters struggle to adapt to rapidly changing social mores. Punctuated with references to the political and cultural milieu of the early ‘70s Moody invokes and subverts nostalgia.”-M. Fredette
Buy it on AmazonA Lakeside Thanksgiving by Leeanna Morgan
Barbara Terry is enjoying working with her sisters at the Lakeside Inn more than she thought she would. But with almost no winter reservations, they need to do something to increase their revenue to meet their loan payments. Putting her marketing and social media skills to good use, she creates a plan that will give them the business they need-as long as she can continue to juggle running the inn with her job in San Diego and planning her sister’s wedding. Theo is an award-winning journalist whose reputation has been destroyed. Starting a community radio station is giving him something positive to focus on while he comes to terms with what happened in New York City. But when the future of the radio station is in jeopardy, he turns to Barbara for help. When the mystery surrounding his arrival in Sapphire Bay is revealed, Theo has to make the most important decision of his life. Will he trust the information Barbara has given him or risk losing her love forever.
Buy it on AmazonThe Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote
“A heart-warming Thanksgiving memoir. Capote’s happiest childhood moments were during his time spent in this “eccentric Alabama household” with four of his much older cousins. This story is set in the Great Depression era yet Capote’s cousins can afford as many turkeys as needed for Thanksgiving dinner so the friends and family come from miles around to celebrate with them. The stand out cousin in this group is the 60-year-old Miss Sook for she has become Capote’s very first friend. Within this story Capote emphasizes the importance of family and friends as Miss Sook helps eight-year-old boy in his dealings with a local bully. A classic tale fit for people of all ages.”-Pirate Steve
Buy it on AmazonThe Ghost at The Table by Suzanne Berne
Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain “devoted”—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters’ long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn’t understand how Frances can ignore the past their father’s presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother’s death twenty-five years earlier.
As Thanksgiving Day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic, suspenseful climax.
Buy it on AmazonTurkey Day Murder by Leslie Meier
“Despite all her volunteer work and family responsibilities, not to mention her part-time reporting job for her local paper, valiant Lucy Stone manages to maintain her poise in her seventh busy outing (after Christmas Cookie Murder). For Lucy, escorting a preschool field trip to a turkey farm, baking pies for charity or entertaining her husband’s difficult clients and son’s college roommate for Thanksgiving dinner is all part of her routine in rural Tinker’s Cove, Maine. For Native American Carl Nolan, life is full of conflict, whether with his boss, the board of selectmen or the local museum’s anthropologist. As Thanksgiving approaches, Lucy covers a town meeting at which the main agenda item is whether the selectmen will support the Metinnicut Indian tribe’s petition for recognition by the federal government. Approval would enable the tribe to build a casino on land belonging to Nolan’s employer. The ink on that story is barely dry when Nolan’s body, his head smashed with a priceless tribal artifact, turns up at the high school Thanksgiving football game. When Lucy accepts the challenge to solve the crime, she finds no lack of suspects.”- Publishers Weekly
Stella
Stella is a Marketing Consultant and has been writing content for Full Text Archive since 2015. When she is not writing, she is meticulously planning our social and e-mail campaigns. Stella holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Russian Literature, which has provided a broad foundation from which she continues to explore the written world.
She spends her free time reading, visiting old castles and discovering new coffee shops. She can be reached at stella