Cozy up and explore new books during this year's Winter Reading Challenge! Your Cromaine Librarians have curated a variety of book lists to kickstart your winter reading, and we are so excited to share them with you. Many of these titles are well reviewed and recent publications, while others are bestsellers, classics from the last few years, or titles that your Cromaine staff love and want to share with you! We hope you find a fantastic read to enjoy this winter.
The 2025-2026 Cromaine Winter Reading Challenge runs until February 28, 2026, so there's plenty of time to log a few titles on Beanstack, and enter to win great prizes! The Adult age group are challenged to complete activities on a bingo card throughout the season-- the more activities you complete, the more virtual tickets you can enter for a chance to win a grand prize! Learn more about this year's Challenge here. Good luck!
The Alchemy of Flowers by Laura Resau
A broken woman. A mysterious job ad. A chance to heal in French castle gardens--but strange things are growing behind the ancient stone walls. This debut adult novel is an enchanting, modern-day take on The Secret Garden, sprinkled with magic: Perfect for fans of Sarah Addison Allen! In The Alchemy of Flowers, those who wish to live and work behind the mysterious walled gardens of Le Château du Paradis must follow many rules-- one of which being that children are forbidden. Although she's locked inside the castle grounds and subjected to strange rules, Eloise's new home enchants her with otherworldly lodging and magical flowers. But when she starts glimpsing a mysterious child in the trees, she reels. Is this a human girl? Or a woodsprite? Is it her imagination, or is this place truly enchanted?
Cape Fever by Nadia Davids
The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes—a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters-- and through this epistolary novel, we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness. This intimate novel highlights the transformative power of the written word, and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.
The Gallagher Place by Juile Doar
Don't miss this winter mystery, perfect for the Holidays! When Marlowe Fisher, an illustrator living in New York City, returns to her family’s bewitching Hudson Valley home for the holidays, she discovers a body in the woods―a murder that draws her back into the haunting case of her teenage best friend’s disappearance two decades earlier. As police descend on the sprawling Fisher property, Marlowe is pulled into an investigation that threatens to unravel the town’s fragile loyalties and expose the shadowed legacy of a weekend home steeped in secrets.
The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling
Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. She's offered a spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls.
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they're both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman who no one has seen in years. When she invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she'll choose the person who'll tell her story, she only gives each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can't swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they're in the same room. And it's becoming abundantly clear that their story-just like the tale Margaret's spinning-could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad...depending on who's telling it.
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they've chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands. They arrive just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group's tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year's Eve, the cord holding them together snaps. On New Year's Day, one of them is dead, and another of them did it.
The Intruder by Frieda McFadden
Cozy up for this winter mystery from bestselling author Freida McFadden! Casey's cabin in the wilderness is not built for a hurricane. Her roof shakes, the lights flicker, and the tree outside her front door sways ominously in the wind. But she's a lot more worried about the girl she discovers lurking outside her kitchen window. She's young. She's alone. And she's covered in blood. The girl won't explain where she came from, or loosen her grip on the knife in her right hand. And when Casey makes a disturbing discovery in the middle of the night, things take a turn for the worse. The girl has a dark secret: one she'll kill to keep. And if Casey gets too close to the truth, she may not live to see the morning.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish-- except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home. If you loved The Martian, you're sure to enjoy this cinematic sci-fi novel from Andy Weir!
The Women by Kristin Hannah
From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women-- at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided. In The Women, twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.
We hope this book list inspires, uplifts, and energizes you this winter. For more reading recommendations, stop by the Library and see our wonderful staff-- and be sure to check out our Youth Book Lists page for your littlest learners!
Stay warm, and happy reading!