Here are 100 books that The Great Christmas Knit-Off fans have personally recommended if you like
The Great Christmas Knit-Off.
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When I was a kid, I used to get to stay up to watch Hallmark movie specials with my Mom. Over the years, I forgot how much I enjoyed them. Then the pandemic hit and I needed something fun to watch, so I got hooked not only on Hallmark movies, but on Christmas books. With all the tension around the world, I found I couldn't write suspense anymore; it brought too much anxiety. Then I got the idea for a couple of Christmas stories. I hope you enjoy reading these Christmas-themed books as much as I did. I suggest snuggling into your favorite reading spot with a comfy blanket, some tea and cookies.
I love mother/daughter stories, especially ones where the mother and daughter are estranged and find a way to come together. Adding a mother who hates Christmas (for good reasons) and two daughters who love the season cranked up the tension that made the ending sweet. Samantha and Ella haven't talked to their mother in five years. After Gayle has an accident at work, her daughters invite her to spend Christmas with them, which opens up old wounds and, eventually, clears the past. I really enjoyed that, even though there is a romance, this story focused on the women.
A no.1 Kindle and Apple and top three Sunday Times bestseller.
'Christmas isn't Christmas without a Sarah Morgan novel to inhale...A feel-good family saga with characters that leap off the page - just perfection' Laura Jane Williams, bestselling author of Our Stop
'Feel-good festive family saga'
Daily Record
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Gayle is a highly successful and motivated business woman, but her success has come at a price - she hasn't spoken to her daughters, Ella and Samantha, for years. But when Gayle has an accident at work, she realises she needs to make amends with her family.
When I was a kid, I used to get to stay up to watch Hallmark movie specials with my Mom. Over the years, I forgot how much I enjoyed them. Then the pandemic hit and I needed something fun to watch, so I got hooked not only on Hallmark movies, but on Christmas books. With all the tension around the world, I found I couldn't write suspense anymore; it brought too much anxiety. Then I got the idea for a couple of Christmas stories. I hope you enjoy reading these Christmas-themed books as much as I did. I suggest snuggling into your favorite reading spot with a comfy blanket, some tea and cookies.
This was simply a fun book. I watch a lot of baking shows, so when I saw that the setting involved both a reality cooking show and a bakery, I knew I was in my element. After an accident on set that leaves one twin sister unable to taste, she needs to swap places with her sister to save the show. This, of course, leads to all sorts of misunderstandings that make the story fast-paced and fun. As a warning, this book will make you hungry, especially for fresh-baked bread.
The International Bestseller—A feel-good, holiday rom com about identical twins who swap lives twelve days before Christmas—perfect for fans of Christina Lauren’s In a Holidaze and Josie Silver’s One Day in December
All they want for Christmas is a different life.
When chef Charlie Goodwin gets hit on the head on the L.A. set of her reality baking show, she loses a lot more than consciousness; she also loses her ability to taste and smell—both critical to her success as show judge. Meanwhile, Charlie's identical twin, Cass, is frantically trying to hold her own life together back in their quaint…
When I was a kid, I used to get to stay up to watch Hallmark movie specials with my Mom. Over the years, I forgot how much I enjoyed them. Then the pandemic hit and I needed something fun to watch, so I got hooked not only on Hallmark movies, but on Christmas books. With all the tension around the world, I found I couldn't write suspense anymore; it brought too much anxiety. Then I got the idea for a couple of Christmas stories. I hope you enjoy reading these Christmas-themed books as much as I did. I suggest snuggling into your favorite reading spot with a comfy blanket, some tea and cookies.
This is another book that features a small British village and a bakery—two of my favorite things. Kate Turner's friend signs her up for a dating program that involves twelve dates. I'm really glad I'm past the dating stage, but it's fun to watch someone else stumble through cringe-worthy, disastrous dates. Especially when she doesn't realize that she already knows Mr. Right, and we all do.
'Tis the season for finding romance in this hilarious and uplifting holiday read
When it comes to relationships, thirty-four-year-old Kate Turner is ready to say "Bah, humbug." The sleepy town of Blexford, England, isn't exactly brimming with prospects, and anyway, Kate's found fulfillment in her career as a designer, and in her delicious side job baking for her old friend Matt's neighborhood café. But then her best friend signs her up for a dating agency that promises to help singles find love before the holidays. Twenty-three days until Christmas. Twelve dates with twelve different men. The odds must finally be…
When I was a kid, I used to get to stay up to watch Hallmark movie specials with my Mom. Over the years, I forgot how much I enjoyed them. Then the pandemic hit and I needed something fun to watch, so I got hooked not only on Hallmark movies, but on Christmas books. With all the tension around the world, I found I couldn't write suspense anymore; it brought too much anxiety. Then I got the idea for a couple of Christmas stories. I hope you enjoy reading these Christmas-themed books as much as I did. I suggest snuggling into your favorite reading spot with a comfy blanket, some tea and cookies.
I have to admit, the dog on the cover sucked me into buying the book. I love books with dogs. I also enjoyed the Christmas scavenger hunt gone awry—where the wrong guy follows the clues. Her fiance keeps disappointing Emmie, but the wrong guy gives her a Christmas she won't forget. This book has Christmas tropes on steroids, but it was a fun romp—a Hallmark movie in book form.
From the writer of Netflix sensation, A Christmas Prince, comes a heart-warming new holiday story showing that sometimes the detour in your journey is the path to true love...
This year, Emmie can't wait to share her favourite Christmas traditions with her boyfriend, Grant. So when his hectic work schedule has him more 'bah humbug' than 'ho, ho, ho,' Emmie creates a holiday-themed scavenger hunt to help him find his festive spirit.
But Emmie's plan for a romantic mountaintop rendezvous backfires when a mix-up has the wrong guy showing up at Christmas Point. Sam, a bestselling mystery writer, thinks Emmie's…
All of us bear the scars of emotional wounds, as complex psychology beats at the heart of all relationships. I’ve personally survived the betrayal of a parent, the loss of a child, emotional abuse, and life with an addict who could look me in the eye and lie. These themes resound in my stories. Literature is a safe place to explore and heal our own traumas through the dramatic interactions of our characters. My witch killer is not just “crazy” he’s unraveling a complex psychological past. In standing with our heroes as they meet and conquer evil, in its many guises, we find our way to healing our own trauma.
I can’t talk Mythic Fiction without a shout-out to the man who penned the phrase. It’s beyond Urban Fantasy—mythic archetypes, mystery, magic, and toe-curling mayhem. When Celtic fiddler, Lizzie Mahone, gets stranded on a lonely country road at midnight, she has no idea how her life will change. Widdershins is a dark dip into the faerie realm that brings us face-to-face with freakish Bogans—nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths—faerie courts in shopping malls, and gripping psychological terror when Jilly Coppercorn gets trapped in a sinister world with her childhood abuser. Politics is rampant. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people. Behind it lurks love and hope.
In Widdershins, fantasy author Charles de Lint has delivered one of his most accessible and moving works of his career.
Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell. Since they were introduced in the first Newford story, "Timeskip," back in 1989, their friends and readers alike have been waiting for them to realize what everybody else already knows: that they belong together. But they've been more clueless about how they feel for each other than the characters in When Harry Met Sally. Now in Widdershins, a stand-alone novel of fairy courts set in shopping malls and the Bohemian street scene of Newford's Crowsea…
I’m an Australian USA Today bestselling romance author who writes contemporary romance and uses the pen name Alyssa James to write medieval romance. I think the makeover trope resonates with me because although I’m no beauty queen now, I was definitely an ugly duckling in my teens. For reasons best known to him, my father insisted on close-cropped hair, and financial circumstances dictated out-of-style hand-me-down clothing. After university, I found my own style, but it wasn’t until I was accepted as an international flight attendant that I believed that I couldn’t be all that ugly if Qantas employed me!
The heroine in this story, Lace, has been through bullying hell as a kid–both for her overweight appearance and when a letter she wrote to Cupid about her crush on football star Pierce was made public.
Sadly, there’s so much bullying in the world today, and Lace felt very real to me. She’s sassy and smart, which is a quality that’s very important to me. She’s loyal to her friends and very devoted to her family. Her defensiveness after all she’d been through hid deep pain, and being a romance author, I want everyone to have a HEA ending!
I enjoyed reading her journey to that HEA and I loved that Pierce didn’t give up on her no matter how hard she pushed him away.
From bestselling romance author Lori Wilde comes All Out of Love, the sizzling second book in her Cupid, Texas, series, set in a town where every wish for love comes true. Millie Greenway and her friends have tried for years to keep the Cupid legend alive in their hometown, but she's not getting much help from her granddaughters. Lace Bettingfield knows the legend is bogus. As a teen, she left a letter at the Cupid statue and got nothing in return but humiliation. But now the guy she dreamed of is back in town, Lace begins to wonder if the…
I’m a voracious reader, an author, and also a book critic, so hundreds of books cross my desk. What I love the most is the feeling of discovery—reading a book whose likes I haven’t seen on any bestseller list or on a front display in a bookstore. There are so many, many hidden gems—books that have stayed with me long after the publication day, and I always want others to have the same devotion to them that I do!
Henderson’s a prize winner and she should be on the top of every reader’s list! Here, she creates a protagonist like no other: a mortician Mary Crampton, living in a stomach-cramp of a town.
What’s surprising and wonderful is that she loves her work, and treats it as art—and I was so fascinated to learn about it. As her town crumbles away, a young man enters her life—a man whose brother was killed in a grain mill. As the two grow closer, the town becomes angrier, making Gal take new stock of the life she has—and the life she could create. So haunting!
High Plains Book Award Winner for Fiction * Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner for Best Contemporary Western Novel * WILLA Literary Award Winner in Contemporary Fiction * Montana Book Award Honor Book
With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach's Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father's mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town.
"The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "
I’ve been fascinated with the extraordinary ever since I read Madeleine L ’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time in middle school.I was also enchanted by Dorothy’s trip from black-and-white Kansas into colorful Oz. I once heard Neil Gaiman mention the “hyperreality” of life, and I thought, Yes!That’s how I want to see the world—the magic everywhere.I voraciously read not only magical realism books but also fantasy. These stories heighten my awareness of the wonder in everything and in everyone, and they deepen the richness of the stories I tell and write.
I love the idea that secrets can be baked into pies and that there’s a chance I could stumble upon a place where wishes come true.
The gift of second chances is highlighted in this story, and as someone with a romantic, hopeful heart, I wantto live in this story while eating a slice of Catch’s famous peach pie.
26 year old Rachel Monroe has spent her whole life trying to keep a very unusual secret: she can make wishes come true. And sometimes the consequences are disastrous. So when Rachel accidentally grants an outlandish wish for the first time in years, she decides it's time to leave her hometown and her past behind for good. Rachel isn't on the road long before she runs out of gas in a town that's not on her map: Nowhere, North Carolina also known as the town of "Lost and Found." In Nowhere, Rachel is taken in by a spit-fire old woman,…
Two instincts drive this list, one “writerly” and one about being human: 1) all good fiction maximizes various kinds of tension, particularly between people, and unusual or unexpected character pairings offer rich tensions; 2) I think we live in times when we are in desperate need of human kindness and must recognize that people from very different backgrounds can come together in their humanity. I love novels with complex characters and in books, as in life, I like to see people grow and change, and a big part of change is letting other people into your life.
Told in spare, clean, beautiful prose, Plainsong picks up on similar themes to An Unfinished Life, with Haruf exploring the unlikely and supportive relationships that emerge for several members of a small Colorado town.
Most reminiscent are the McPheron brothers, elderly rancher bachelors who take in Victoria, a pregnant teenage girl. Then there is Tom Guthrie, whose depressed wife leaves him alone to raise their two boys. Told in chapters that focus on these different characters, their lives become entwined and they find paths through crisis with the help of practical strangers.
I fell in love with this book and these characters long before I had the random and amazing chance to have Kent Haruf voluntarily come and spend an hour with young fiction writers, the man as kind and nurturing as his characters.
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision…
I’ve written fourteen novels about family, friendship, food, and love; stories that I hope transport people so completely and utterly, that they almost forget they are reading and instead find themselves walking in the shoes of the characters. That’s what I’m aiming for anyway. As a reader it’s what I want also – to laugh and cry, and feel the characters are people that I know and feel sorry to leave them behind when I turn the last page.
Bittersweet, funny, and wise, this is an entirely perfect novel about life and love in a small town.
Jane moves to Boyne City, Michigan to work as a schoolteacher. There she falls in love with the amiable and handsome Duncan. Unfortunately, he has slept with pretty much every available woman in town and remains closely bound to his ex-wife.
When a single event shatters Jane’s life, she discovers how friends can become your family, and how sometimes they need you as much as you need them.
I loved every single word of this quirky and wonderful story.
Alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, a wise, bighearted novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family—from the acclaimed author of Standard Deviation, who has been called the "literary descendant of Jane Austen, sharing Austen's essentially comic world view" (NPR).
Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan's old girlfriends everywhere—at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away.
While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes…
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