Books We Loved, Dec. 2025

If there’s ever a time for curling up with a good book and your beverage of choice, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is that time. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas itself, there are many other winter holidays to choose from, and at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather and the long, dark nights make snuggling on a sofa, book in hand, the ideal way to spend an evening. So here are three books we love at Five Directions Press, as well as three authors worth following even at less hectic times.

S. J. Bennett, The Queen Who Came In from the Cold (Crooked Lane Books, 2025)

Amateur detectives come in many forms. Owning a bookstore or a bakery, running a charming country inn, or working in a library puts a character into the category of potential sleuth. But few creators of amateur detectives can top S. J. Bennett, whose Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series turns Queen Elizabeth II herself into a solver of crimes.

The first three books take place in 2016, when the queen is ninety years old. Even these days, those don’t qualify as historical fiction. But they set the tone of the series, which is at once respectful and warm, even charming. The mysteries are challenging, the queen’s role believable, and the family relationships well portrayed.

Certain constraints on the queen also appear here. For example, she can solve mysteries, but she can’t be seen to solve them, because she is the queen. Similarly, she relies for help on other women, who serve as her private secretaries (a job that goes far beyond typing), because the men spend far too much time worrying about upsetting their monarch rather than trusting her to know what she needs and wants.

Obviously, even if one is the queen of England, only so many mysterious deaths can take place nearby without raising eyebrows. So book 4, A Death in Diamonds, moves back in time to 1957 and a scandal possibly involving Prince Philip. The latest novel, as the title suggests, takes place during the Cold War, specifically 1961, and involves Soviet spies and double agents, including the infamous Kim Philby. To say more would be to give too much away, but it’s yet another engrossing tale with a twist at the end that  turns the entire story on its head.

And yes, there are Corgis—racehorses, too! Find out more about the series and how it came into being from my interview with the author on the New Books Network.—CPL

Uzma Jalaludin, Yours for the Season (Mindy’s Book Studio, 2025)

What would the winter holidays be without a Christmas-themed rom-com set in an idyllic small town? The delight in these stories—and in watching The Hallmark Channel, for those who do—lies not in the ending, which anyone who’s ever read a romance can predict, but in the journey and the characters and the obstacles they face.

Uzma Jalaludin, author of the Detective Aunty series, among other books, knows this. In Yours for the Season, she transports two troubled twenty-somethings from Atlanta, Georgia, to a small town in Alaska where, surrounded by their estranged families, they must decide what they want from themselves and each other, as well as how to get there given their difficult pasts.

Sameera Malik grew up Muslim, the daughter of Indian parents who emigrated first to Syria, then to the United States. When we meet her, she’s recovering from a bad breakup with a man who left her with thousands of dollars in debt to repay while she works for a high-intensity law firm that has announced plans to cut its workforce in the new year. Sameera’s ties to her family still need much work after several years of estrangement, caused in part by that relationship gone wrong. When she runs into Tom Cooke, who’s catering the holiday party at her firm, the two hit it off, but she’s too worried about losing her job and too heart-sore from the bad breakup to consider dating anyone else.

But Tom is a social media influencer with hopes of landing a cooking show on the Food Network. He talks Sameera into filming a video that goes viral. Next thing they know, Sameera’s mom has decided their non-relationship is serious. She contacts Tom’s stepmom, and soon the entire family is heading for Alaska, unaware that Tom and his father have wildly clashing views of what Tom should be doing with his life …

It’s all delightfully light-hearted and humorous, including the cultural clash between the Christian Cookes and the Muslim Maliks—funny because both sides are doing their best to be sensitive without really understanding what that entails. And by the time everything resolves at the end, readers will agree that, yes, this was meant to happen.—CPL

Emily Stone, Love, Holly (Dell, 2023)

Emily Stone has made balancing grief and renewal over the holiday season her modus operandi, and Love, Holly is no exception. The premise is simple enough: a long-ago holiday tragedy derails multiple lives, and years later, a misdirected letter pulls Holly back into contact with the people she unintentionally hurt.

Holly, the protagonist, is a study in avoidance. She’s built her entire adult life around the idea that it’s better to stay small and unseen than risk repeating past harm. Her guilt is persistent but not melodramatic, making her real and appealing but never venturing into unwarranted “woe-is-me” territory.

The parallel storyline—Emma and Jack navigating their own grief—adds a necessary counterpoint. Their dynamic as estranged grandmother-with-a-terminal-illness and grandson-who-doesn’t-have-the-whole-story could easily have veered into cliché, but Stone uses the dual perspectives to explore the different ways in which families handle grief and loss. The result is a quieter emotional tension than you might expect from a holiday-set novel, but a richer one.

Structurally, Stone’s pacing is deliberate. Healing, as it turns out, is a marathon and not a race. And while the book is presented with all the holiday trimmings—twinkling lights, cozy gatherings, enough atmospheric London charm to appeal to lovers of classic holiday rom-coms such as Love, Actually and The Holiday—it relies on those elements to do the emotional heavy lifting. It’s the pretty paper in which the characters and their stories are wrapped.

Where the novel succeeds most, analytically speaking, is in its depiction of forgiveness as a reciprocal process. No one gets absolution for free—not Holly, not Emma, not Jack—and Stone resists the temptation to make reconciliation feel tidy or inevitable. If anything, the story suggests that closure is less of an event and more of a negotiated truce with one’s own history.

Love, Holly may position itself as a holiday romance, but at its core it’s a character-driven meditation on grief, responsibility, and the fragile courage required to choose connection again.—CJH