The Book Club

A Wampanoag-centred history of Plymouth that runs from an ancient homeland to a sachem's reburial in 2017, with the war of 1675 at its heart. Silverman makes the holiday's founding story impossible to hear the same way again, though his advocacy sometimes outruns his evidence.

Two barefoot boys run home across the Oklahoma prairie in 1895 with their trousers tied at the ankles and stuffed with pecans. Kimmerer's essays begin there and keep finding history, botany and family inside the plants at their feet, with a tendency to preach that the finest pieces never need.

An Englishman nurses a dying sachem back to health, and an alliance is sealed at a sickbed. Nathaniel Philbrick's history of Plymouth Colony traces how that friendship held for half a century, how the next generation threw it away, and how the holiday we inherited was assembled long afterwards.

A seventy-five-year-old woman in pajamas sits on her roof watching the stars while half the street gathers below and the police arrive. Her aunt, who called them, has fallen asleep in the porch hammock. Richard Bausch's autumn novel begins as farce and slowly earns its seat at the holiday table.

Three in the morning in a Seoul apartment, a jet-lagged mother and daughter raid the grandmother's refrigerator for banchan and raw crab. Zauner's memoir of losing that mother is built from such meals, and it is at its best when the cooking has to stand in for words.

A summer afternoon in 1990, a crash by the lighthouse, and a nine-year-old who will spend the next twenty-five years filling in what nobody told her. Heather Aimee O'Neill's first novel gathers three grown sisters at their mother's table for one storm-bound Thanksgiving.

A battered player organ reappears in a Concord living room after thirty years, smelling of mildew and family legend. Berne's Thanksgiving novel turns two sisters' competing memories of their mother's death into something close to a ghost story, brilliant in its flashbacks and uneven in its crowd scenes.