These Crafty Romances Make Great Autumn Reads

As of Sunday, it’s officially fall, and with the crisp days and cooler nights comes the impulse toward cozy novels, the literary equivalent of a Fair Isle sweater and a cup of chai. Whether you enjoy spending your evenings chatting with your knitting circle, wielding a hot glue gun, or covered in flour from yet another batch of late-summer-fruit pies, there’s a homey romance for you.
1. Kate Jacobs’ Friday Night Knitting Club series, in which a group of women meet at a New York yarn shop, is a perennial book club favorite. The first installment focuses on Georgia, the shop’s owner and a single mother of 12-year-old Dakota, whose world is upended when Dakota’s father re-enters their lives. Three later books follow Dakota and the other members of Georgia’s knitting circle.
2. Vivian Arend’s Rocky Mountain Desire, third in a series about the Coleman family of strapping bachelor brothers, combines a homey hobby (in this case, the heroine, Hope, runs a quilt shop in the small Alberta town of Rocky Mountain House) with a sizzling-hot relationship that develops between Hope and her sister’s ex, Matt. You gotta keep warm in Alberta somehow.
3. The only thing better than another book in a beloved series is a prequel. Marie Bostwick’s Between Heaven and Texas allows fans of her Cobbled Court Quilts series to see what their favorite characters were up to before they met them, telling the story of how quilter Mary Dell Templeton got her happy ending.
4. I took a vow to never miss an opportunity to push Nora Roberts books on the unsuspecting, so this time around I’m recommending Dance Upon the Air, the first in her Three Sisters Island trilogy. Talented baker Nell Channing flees her abusive husband and lands on a remote Massachusetts island, where she discovers not only that the island sheriff, Zack, is a sexy, protective dreamboat—but also that she, like her employer, Mia, and Zack’s sister, Ripley, is a witch. Cinnamon sticky rolls and paranormal thrills—what more could you ask for?
5. Finally, in The Sugar Cookie Sweetheart Swap, authors Donna Kauffman, Kate Angell, and Kimberly Kincaid each contribute a short story with a holiday baking theme. This book has everything—sexy firefighters, porny gingerbread, a chef-on-chef ego battle—and it’ll make you want to break out the icing sugar and pastry tips a couple months early.
Do you have a favorite craft-themed romance?