A TOME FOR CHRISTMAS? From biographies to histories to thrillers, leafs through some of the books you’ll want to curl up with this Christmas time
WHETHER you’re after history or humour, murder or memoir, there’s a book out there to give a loved one this Christmas – or just to keep for yourself to escape the festivities for a few hours.
The big hitters expected to make it under the tree include Booker Prizewinner The Testaments by
Margaret Atwood (Chatto
& Windus, £20, pictured top right), Lee Child’s new
Jack Reacher thriller Blue
Moon (Bantam, £20, pictured centre) and Adam
Kay’s hilarious and heartbreaking Twas The
Nightshift Before Christmas (Picador, £9.99), a great stocking-filler, says
Bea Carvalho, Waterstones fiction buyer.
“John Le Carre’s Agent
Running In The Field
(Viking, £20) will also be way up there, while in non-fiction the one to watch is Charlie Mackesy’s
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox
And The Horse (Ebury,
£16.99, pictured bottom), a charming, inspirational collection of illustrations which has already cornered the gift market this year,” she adds.
“Bill Bryson’s The Body (Doubleday,
£25) and Elton John’s memoir, Me (Macmillan, £25), will be staples of Christmas gifting, while on the food and drink front, Jamie Oliver’s Veg (Michael Joseph £26) is likely to be a big seller, although Dishoom (Bloomsbury, £26), which is the cookbook which has come out of the restaurant chain of the same name, is expected to be up there.”
So what other good reads will make the pick of gifts this Christmas?
MRS HINCH:
THE ACTIVITY JOURNAL by Mrs Hinch
THIS follow-up to cleaning tip tome Hinch Yourself Happy by the mega-popular Instagrammer Mrs Hinch (real name Sophie Hinchliffe) focuses on giving yourself the gift of time out, time to plan, relax, destress and dream.
As well as planning your own ‘hinching’ (aka cleaning) lists, the book also features light-hearted activities and is a dip-in, dip-out gift, ideal if you only have a few minutes to yourself over Christmas.
FOR those who’d rather immerse themselves in nail-biting tension than Christmas lethargy, the first standalone novel in a decade from bestselling writing partnership Nicci Gerrard and Sean French may be the ideal gift.
Centring on a woman who’s had a mid-life fling, only to turn up at her lover’s pad to find him brutally murdered, it will provide an escape from the TV reruns.
THE contradictory, cantankerous anti-heroine Olive Kitteridge returns more than a decade after she was first introduced in Strout’s novel of the same name, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, but this outing sees her growing older. Set in a small coastal town in Maine, Olive’s husband has died and while she hasn’t mellowed, she shows her vulnerability and awareness of her own mortality.
In the mix is a teenager who has lost her father and a nurse with a secret high school crush.
It’s about transformative moments among people otherwise disconnected.
CHOIR CREATURE
THE Walliams by David Dec
£12.99, out HarperCollins,
12
book picture festive feelgood Walliams THIS author Tony
bestselling illustrator from the
acclaimed Warble and sing, Ross seed to
who loves with Walrus, avalanche
an causing warbling.
atrocious her expect,
you’d
But, as fine
turn out things celebration
A in the end. makes
what of doing
happy. you
THIS year’s other Booker winner, which follows 12 people, mostly black British women, in different decades whose intergenerational stories connect down the years, raising questions of feminism
and race.
Political Scandal, Personal Struggle and the Years that Defined Elizabeth II, 1956-1977 (Blink Publishing, £20).
GAME OF THRONES: A GUIDE TO WESTEROS AND BEYOND by Myles McNutt
Michael Joseph, £20 GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
FOR fans who tuned in to all eight seasons of this colossal series, this official, definitive companion to the show, published in partnership with HBO, is packed with gorgeous illustrations and insightful essays on the fascinating characters and complex storylines that made the show such a phenomenon.
It’s a collector’s dream.
THE GIVER OF STARS by Jojo Moyes Michael Joseph, £20
BEST known for her trilogy featuring Lou Clark – Me Before You, After You and Still Me – Moyes is back with a standalone tale based on the story of the real-life Horseback Librarians of Kentucky, in which a group of five women are brought together in a tiny community in the mountains of rural America.
It concentrates on sisterhood and friendship as the women discover freedom on the trail and develop newfound confidence to face their own problems.
THE END IS ALWAYS NEAR by Dan Carlin William Collins, £20
ANYONE who has listened to this clever political commentator’s awardwinning
Hardcore History podcast, lauded for its blend of high drama and riveting narration, should put this on their Christmas wish list.
Carlin looks at historical disasters to find out if they could ever happen again and tackles some of history’s biggest what-ifs, from whether heroes like Alexander the Great were in fact comparable to Hitler, to whether our greatest social upheavals came in the wake of our most deadly epidemics.