If you’re traveling over Thanksgiving or spending hours in the kitchen preparing the perfect meal, here are three audiobooks that will help set the mood.

‘Squanto: A Native Odyssey,’ by Andrew Lipman

Native American history, a subject honored this month, has been revised and distorted for centuries. The story of Squanto, the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving is a prime example. Lipman’s book is a step toward amending that. Piecing together written accounts with informed speculation, he creates a detailed picture of the life, times and posthumous representations of Squanto, whose real name was Tisquantum.

Kidnapped and taken to Europe in 1614, he was to be sold into slavery but escaped and ended up in London, where he learned English, the key to his later success as an interpreter and diplomat for the Pilgrims. Squanto’s influence fed his ambition to become a chief, which nearly led to his death. (Disease took him months later.)

Lipman describes Squanto’s afterlife in popular culture and gives a brisk history of the evolution of Thanksgiving from its fairly insignificant origin to its later association with the Pilgrims and eventual installation as a national holiday in 1863. Veteran narrator David Colacci delivers this revelatory biography and social history at an easy pace. His voice is smooth and engaging, keeping the listener focused throughout a very complex narrative. (Tantor, Unabridged, 9 hours) 

‘Be Ready When the Luck Happens,’ by Ina Garten

Narrating her own memoir, Ina Garten, a.k.a. the Barefoot Contessa, is the upbeat companion you want in your ear while preparing a Thanksgiving feast. Her enthusiasm for cooking is irresistible, and even her mishaps — described with gusto, solved with panache — are buoying.

She shares her life story: her unhappy childhood, her marriage at 20, a life-defining sojourn to France and the unfulfilling White House job she left to become proprietor of a gourmet shop in East Hampton, New York, where she blossomed, selling prepared meals and producing recipes that simplified dishes that once involved herculean preparation. Then came multiple cookbooks and a popular cooking show that brought her into so many American homes. Garten has an appetizing voice in which a very occasional soupçon of her native Brooklyn can be detected. (Random House, Unabridged, 8¾ hours. A PDF of a selection of recipes and photographs is included in the download.)

‘Precipice,’ by Robert Harris

Harris’s latest historical novel opens in the summer of 1914, with war on the horizon. Britain’s married prime minister, 61-yearold H.H. Asquith, is besotted with a wealthy aristocrat, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley. Harris incorporates authentic love letters written by Asquith, in part to illustrate how his passion affected his decisions, most fatally in the Gallipoli campaign — a disastrous operation championed by Winston Churchill. Paul Deemer, a fictional Special Branch detective, is brought in to investigate the case, knitting together fact and fiction.

Award-winning actor Samuel West (Siegfried Farnon in the current “All Creatures Great and Small”) narrates the book with extraordinary empathy. He brings all the old-man yearning — poignant and desperate, needy and reckless — to Asquith’s letters, ranges freely and credibly through a variety of British accents across classes and geography, and captures a bumptious Churchill and sly David Lloyd George, Asquith’s successor. (Harper, Unabridged, 12 ½ hours)