In this post, Iโm sharing 12 cozy fall books that are perfect for adding a little magic, mystery, and atmosphere to your fall TBR list.
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From hauntingly beautiful fantasies to dark and twisty thrillers, fall invites the perfect excuse to curl up with a cozy blanket, a warm drink, and a story that lingers.
Thereโs something quietly magical about the shift into fallโฆ the soft golden light, the scent of something spiced in the air, the way the world seems to slow down just enough for stories to take root.
As the weather cools down and the days feel a little more inward, I always find myself craving books that reflect the season: a mix of mystery, depth, and just enough escapism.
This yearโs fall reading list is a blend of lyrical fantasies, unsettling thrillers, and character-driven tales that feel perfect for cozy evenings.
If youโre building your own fall TBR list for the season, here are twelve picks that might just keep you turning pages well past midnight.
12 Cozy Fall Books to Add to Your 2025 TBR List
From lyrical fantasies to eerie thrillers, these cozy fall books are perfect for building your autumn reading list. Click a title below for the synopsis and purchase links. For even more fall reading suggestions, click here to see my complete list.
- The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
- Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli
- Nocticadia by Keri Lake
- The Witch of Willow Hall by Hester Fox
- Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
- Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma
- Cackle by Rachel Harrison
- The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
- One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
- In the Company of Witches by Auralee Wallace
1 / The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
The next installment of the Millennium series: Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salanderโs innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past.
2 / Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli
On the night Runeโs life changed forever, blood ran in the streets. Now, in the aftermath of a devastating revolution, witches have been diminished from powerful rulers to outcasts ruthlessly hunted due to their waning magic, and Rune must hide what she is.
Spending her days pretending to be nothing more than a vapid young socialite, Rune spends her nights as the Crimson Moth, a witch vigilante who rescues her kind from being purged. When a rescue goes wrong, she decides to throw the witch hunters off her scent and gain the intel she desperately needs by courting the handsome Gideon Sharpe – a notorious and unforgiving witch hunter loyal to the revolution – who she can’t help but find herself falling for.
Gideon loathes the decadence and superficiality Rune represents, but when he learns the Crimson Moth has been using Runeโs merchant ships to smuggle renegade witches out of the republic, he inserts himself into her social circles by pretending to court her right back. He soon realizes that beneath her beauty and shallow faรงade, is someone fiercely intelligent and tender who feels like his perfect match. Except, what if sheโs the very villain heโs been hunting?
3 / Nocticadia by Keri Lake
After watching my mother succumb to a mysterious illness, I promised myself two things. Iโd find the cure for what ravaged her. And leave the godforsaken city where she abandoned me.
Four years later, I receive an acceptance letter from Dracadia University, one of the oldest, most prestigious schools in the country. Nestled on a secluded island off the coast of Maine, itโs rumored to be haunted by the souls of the mental patients exiled there centuries before. Those whose bones are said to make up the islandโs white sandy shores.
And restless ghosts arenโt even its most daunting peculiarity.
Devryck Bramwell, known on campus as Doctor Death, is a brilliant pathologist in charge of the midnight lab. Heโs also my devastatingly handsome professor, who seems to loathe tenacious first-years, like me. Except, his dark and enigmatic gaze tells me all the ways heโd devour me if given the chance, and his stolen kisses burn my lips with forbidden jealousy.
4 / The Witch of Willow Hall by Hester Foxย
New Oldbury, 1821
The house holds its breath, trying to outlast meโฆ
Something has awakened in Willow Hall. Eighteen-year-old Lydia Montrose can feel it. But she has no idea what it is.
Rocked by rumor and scandal, Lydia, her parents, and her sisters, Catherine and Emeline, fled their sparkling life in Boston for the sleepy country estate. But bone-chilling noises in the night have Lydia convinced their idyllic new home wasnโt exactly vacant when they arrived.
The Salem witch trials cast a long shadow over the Montrose family as the cloying heat of summer in Massachusetts mingles with something sinister in the air. The sprawling history of Willow Hall is no stranger to secrets, and its dark past soon calls to Lydia, igniting ancient magic she never knew she possessed. But with menacing forces unwilling to rest, threatening to tear her family apart, Lydia must learn to harness her newly discovered power or risk losing everyone she holds dear.
5 / Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.
The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.
6 / Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma
Orphaned heiress Kidan Adane grew up far from the arcane society she was born into, where human bloodlines gain power through vampire companionship. When her sister, June, disappears, Kidan is convinced a vampire stole herโthe very vampire bound to their family, the cruel yet captivating Susenyos Sagad.
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To find June, Kidan must infiltrate the elite Uxlay Universityโwhere students study to ensure peaceful coexistence between humans and vampires and inherit their family legacies. Kidan must survive living with Susenyosโeven as he does everything he can to drive her away. It doesnโt matter that Susenyosโs wickedness speaks to Kidanโs own violent nature and tempts her to surrender to a life of darkness. She must find her sister and kill Susenyos at all costs.
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When a murder mirroring Juneโs disappearance shakes Uxlay, Kidan sinks further into the ruthless underworld of vampires, risking her very soul. There she discovers a centuries-old threatโand June could be at the center of it. To save her sister, Kidan must bring Uxlay to its knees and either break free from the horrors of her own actions or embrace the dark entanglements of loveโand the blood it requires.
7 / Cackle by Rachel Harrison
All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. Sheโs stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.ย ย
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Then Annie meets Sophie. Beautiful, charming, magnetic Sophie, who takes a special interest in Annie, who wants to be her friend. More importantly, she wants Annie to stop apologizing and start living for herself. Thatโs how Sophie lives. Annie canโt help but gravitate toward the self-possessed Sophie, wanting to spend more and more time with her, despite the fact that the rest of the townsfolk seemโฆa little afraid of her. And like, okay. There are some things. Sophieโs appearance is uncanny and ageless, her mansion in the middle of the woods feels a little unearthly, and she does seem to wield a certain powerโฆbut she couldnโt beโฆcould she?
8 / The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three.
A teenage girl who isnโt allowed outside, not after last time.
A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory.
And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible.
An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.
9 / The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
10 / The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
France, 1939 – In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France โฆ but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gรคetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can โฆ completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
11 / One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her.
Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom she calls homeโshe needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets.
But nothing comes for free, especially magic.
When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure the kingdom of the dark magic infecting it. Except the highwayman just so happens to be the Kingโs own nephew, Captain of the Destriersโฆand guilty of high treason.
He and Elspeth have until Solstice to gather twelve Providence Cardsโthe keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly, darkly, taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.
12 / In the Company of Witches by Auralee Wallace
For four hundred years, the Warren witches have used their magic to quietly help the citizens of the sleepy New England town of Evenfall thrive. Thereโs never been a problem they couldnโt handle. But then Constance Gravesโa local known for being argumentative and demandingโdies while staying at the bed and breakfast Brynn Warren maintains with her aunts. At first, it seems like an accidentโฆbut it soon becomes clear that thereโs something more sinister at work, and Aunt Nora is shaping up to be the prime suspect.
Thereโs nothing Brynn wants more than to prove Noraโs innocence, and it hurts her to know that even two years ago that might have been easier. Brynn, after all, is a witch of the deadโa witch who can commune with ghosts. Ghosts never remember much about their deaths, but Constance might remember something about her life that would help crack the case. But Brynn hasnโt used her powers since her husband died, and isnโt even sure she still can. Brynn will just have to hope that her auntsโ magic and her own investigative skills will lead her to answersโand maybe back to the gift she once thought herself ready to give up forever.
Whether youโre lighting a candle before you crack open the first page or slipping a book into your bag for a quiet weekend escape, I hope this list brings a little extra inspo to your reading season. If youโve read any of these, or have fall favorites of your own, Iโd love to hear whatโs on your list.
Happy Reading!
For more fall and autumn book recommendations, check out my complete list here!
Xx Laura
This post was all about a curated list of cozy and atmospheric books to add to your fall TBR list. Like this content? Check out these posts below:
– Books to Read During Cozy Season | Fall TBR List
– 12 Captivating Mystery, Thriller, and Fantasy Novels | Fall TBR List
– Beautiful Books | For the Art, Fashion, and Home Decor Lovers
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