Turn the page on 2025: Must-read novels promising pure escape!

With the holiday season approaching and winter chills setting in Vizag, it’s the perfect time to dig into your TBR (To Be Read) list. Here is a list of must-read novels, including a few holiday classics, for your 2025 reading. Picture yourself in a cosy corner, wearing your favourite cardigan, sipping hot chocolate with a novel perched on your lap. This selection will make your holiday season even more special.

Novels you should have and must-read on your reading list this festive season!

1. Chocolate Lovers Club series by Carole Matthews

This series of 4 novels follows 4 women who are die-hard chocolate lovers and become best friends after bonding over their mutual love for chocolate. The four women, Lucy, Chantal, Autumn, and Nadia, each face their own set of challenges, but find comfort in Chocolate Heaven, the cafe that brought them together. This story is about the adventures, fun, and heartbreak these feisty women go through together, and it centres around their friendship and their die-hard love for chocolate.

2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A cold-hearted man, Ebenezer Scrooge, who absolutely hates Christmas, is visited by three spirits on the night of Christmas, and they give him flashbacks as well as a peek into his miserable future and lonely end. Scrooge sends away the volunteers collecting donations and declines his nephew Fred’s invitation to the family dinner, allotting a day of the Christmas holiday to his painfully underpaid clerk Bob with great difficulty. Bob’s family lives in poverty-stricken conditions, and his son Tiny Tim is battling a life-threatening illness. He wakes up a changed man and makes heartwarming changes. The hauntingly beautiful story has retained its place as one of the must-read novels for over a century.   

3. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (First 3 books)

The all-time favourite book series, which has become a huge part of the Halloween and Christmas seasons, has left a huge impact on both book lovers and non-book lovers. The first three books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, are worldwide Christmas favourites. One can’t help but long to spend a mesmerising Christmas in Hogwarts.​

4. The Inheritance by Annabelle Dilke

Set in 1960s England, on a lavish estate, the story follows the Chandler family. Beneath their elite appearance are deeper struggles. The wedding of the eldest daughter changes the family’s fate: the family includes a mother, the intelligent younger sister who attends Oxford, a little brother, and a womanising father whose actions affect the family for decades, even after his death. The story centres around the theme of aristocracy, pretence and infidelity. 

5. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

This one is for the mystery and crime lovers! A manipulative and not-so-ideal father, Simeon Lee, who has been estranged from his family for most of his life, invites his now adult children and their families over for Christmas dinner. His kids, aware of his nature, are all suspicious. The air is thick with resentment and tension. The story takes a twist when Lee is found dead in his concealed and locked room. Hercule Poirot steps in to assist with the investigation, where the victim is surrounded by people who all have reasons to kill him.

Curling up in your bed and watching movies and series is fun, but the art of reading brings unmatched joy, especially to those who love literature and know how it feels to travel worlds through pages from that corner of your room. So make yourself a fresh batch of cookies or any snacks that you like, grab a cup of steaming hot chocolate, and gear up to transport to a different world with this list of must-read novels! 

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