The best books to give as presents this Christmas
Author of Tom Lake (Bloomsbury) I’ll be wrapping The Heaven& Earth Grocery Store (Orion),a novel that takes place at the intersection of the Black and Jewish communities, which turns out to be a grocery store. This is James McBride (always fabulous) at his very best. The second book I’ll give is by Alice McDermott, who has always been one of our greatest writers, but Absolution (Bloomsbury) exceeds every expectation. It is one of the finest modern novels I’ve read, a moral masterpiece. In my stocking I’d like to findThe Magician’s Elephant (Walker) by Kate DiCamillo, which isn’t just for young readers, but for everyone who enjoys a riveting plot, gorgeous writing, suspense and magic, all in a book that can be read in under two hours.
Mary Beard Author of
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World(Profile)
I will be giving Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), her great launch into historical novels (and brilliantly read by her, complete with the right accents, for the audio version). And I won’t be able to resist giving Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker (National Gallery of Ireland), edited by Aoife Brady. Fontana was a 16th-century female artist from Bologna, and the book is based on an exhibition of her work in Dublin earlier this year. It’s completely eye-opening . In my stocking, please could I find any paperback version of Chaucer’s TheCanterbury Tales. I’ve read most of them, but never cover to cover. Christmas might be a chance.
Clive Myrie Author of
Everything Is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate & Hope (Hodder & Stoughton)
I was impressed with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, about a well-off Irish family that falls on hard times. Money perhaps helped suppress the turmoil within, masking a true understanding of their world, as well as the wider one in which they live. It’s funny and painful with ghosts from the past and spectres from the future. Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (Vintage) is a romp through what I suspect many people of all political persuasions would agree has been a bewildering recent history in British politics. There are larger questions about the state of democracy but also gossip and funny individual episodes. What I would like to receive is a bound copy of the evidence in the ongoing Covid inquiry. The Starr report into the conduct of President Clinton, including his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, was a bestseller. From what we’ve already heard, the Covid inquiry could be one too.
Mick Herron
Author of The Secret Hours (John Murray Press)
Books I’ll enjoy giving as gifts this year include The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid and newly published by “Fabers”, as Heaney was wont to dub his publisher. The warm and generous spirit of the most lauded poet of his generation shines through this volume: it’s a delight. Others can expect to unwrap Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Fabers again), a terrific slice of alternative world noir that’s fully realised and deeply satisfying. And if Santa’s been paying attention, I’ll find The Mirror and the Road: ConversationsWith William Boyd (Penguin, edited by Alistair Owen) in my own stocking.
Deborah Levy
Author of August Blue (Hamish Hamilton)
I will be wrapping copies of Wish I Was Here (Profile) by M John Harrison. This dazzling anti-memoir is nothing less than a portrait of a writer with a beautiful mind. Harrison turns over what it takes to simultaneously be present to everyday life and imaginative flight. A masterpiece. I’ll also be giving The Plague (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Jacqueline Rose. The vitality of these valuable essays on death, war and Simone Weil keeps on giving long after the last page has been turned. A distinguished gift to find in my own stocking for any year, Irenosen Okojie’s boldly captivating collection of stories Nudibranch (Dialogue) is a thrilling mix of social surrealism and technical verve.
Craig Brown
Author of One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (4th Estate)
Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge makes grim reading: the government of Britain in the hands of shock jocks, and a civil service in a state of resigned torpor. But the sharpness of the character sketches and the restless nature of the author, by turns selfloving and self-loathing, make it burst with life. Art Exposed (Pallas Athene) by the museum curator Julian Spalding is a bracing trumpet blast against the drear pieties of the contemporary art establishment, and includes witty portraits of encounters with, among many others, the late queen and Sir Roy Strong. I’ve only just come across the poems of AE Stallings. They’re a joy: simple, playful, profound. I’d be happy to find her verse translation of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics) in my stocking on Christmas morning.
Jacqueline Crooks
Author of Fire Rush(Vintage) Radical: A Life of My Own by Xiaolu Guo (Vintage) is a book I will be giving to several friends. More than a memoir, it is as much about the skilful exploration of language as it is about a woman stepping outside her world, taking risks in a new territory. How toSay Babylon (4th Estate) by Safiya Sinclair is another memoir that delivers on many levels. I love her use of patois and Rastafarian vernacular, which together create a strong sense of Jamaica, its people and its past. I would love to receive Cane, Corn & Gully (OutSpoken) by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. Experimental, brave, exciting.
Bret Easton Ellis
Author of The Shards (Swift Press) Of the new novels I came across this year, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton) was the most enjoyable. A sprawling, Franzenesque saga about the Barnes family in Ireland recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, it’s an amazing piece of realist fiction, full-bodied, multi-narrative; a huge swing by Murray. On the opposite side of the spectrum was The Guest by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus), an eerie, miniaturist character study about a few days in the life of a female grifter drifting through the Hamptons – the simple power and pull of the novel lies in its ambiguity, its refusal to try to explain Alex – that’s the point: you can’t. The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics) is the paperback I’d choose to receive and keep – I don’t know why I’d never read this Edith Wharton masterpiece, but it was the most satisfying reading experience of the year and made me question whether she was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.
Claire Kilroy
Author of Soldier Sailor (Faber)
This Plague of Souls (Canongate) depicts a man returning to his empty home after a spell in prison. His family is missing. The signal difference between this and other novels about middle-aged, soul-searching men is Mike McCormack’s uncanny ability to reveal the contents of his protagonist’s soul. Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape), so good they named it twice, so good I read it twice – and read two different novels, because moral positions are incorrigibly plural in Enrightville, reflecting the world we are in. The Colony (Faber) by Audrey Magee has received enough recommendations to bump it to the top of my stocking wishlist.
Jyoti Patel
Author of The Things That We Lost (Merky)
Wandering Souls (4th Estate)by Cecile Pin is the book I’ve recommended most this year, so I’ll definitely be wrapping up a copy or two this Christmas. It follows a family of nine fleeing war-torn Vietnam, with only three surviving the journey. Finding themselves in Thatcher’s Britain, they attempt to build new lives around their grief. It’s tenderly woven and so beautifully assured. I’ll also be giving Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (4th Estate). I adored this collection of short stories following a Jamaican family in Miami for its honesty and how its prose brims with warmth and heart. I’d love to receive a paperback of Brown Girls (4th Estate) by Daphne Palasi Andreades in my stocking. I fell in love with it for many reasons, not least for the masterful use of first-person plural, which results in a joyful, almost choral narrative voice.
Mark O’Connell
Author of A Thread of Violence (Granta)
David Grann’s brilliant and compelling book The Wager (Simon & Schuster) seems to me like a safe Christmas bet for any reader who enjoys a good story, well told. I’ve been a big fan of Rachel Connolly’s writing for a long time, and her debut novel, Lazy City (Canongate) , did not disappoint. And if anyone feels like buying me a book for Christmas, please make it Jeremy Lewis’s Cyril Connolly: A Life (Pimlico). A friend of mine has been pumping a WhatsApp group chat full of amazing quotes from this 1997 book over the last couple of months, and it’s amounted to a very effective viral marketing campaign.
Peter Frankopan
Author of The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury)
Top of my list of gifts to give is Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933 (Bloomsbury), a sparkling if unsettling account of the years after the end of the first world war, which were marked by economic desperation and repeated false dawns before the terrible reality of Hitler’s ascent to power. I was thrilled that Penguin Classics published a new translation of The Secret History of the Mongols by Christopher P Atwood this year. It’s a spectacular text and a wonderful edition that I will also be wrapping several copies of. I always hope to find Wisden in my Christmas stocking. I got mine early as I was invited to give a speech at Lord’s to mark its launch back in April. So this year’s copy is extra special to me.
Megan Nolan Ordinary Human Failings
Author of
(Jonathan Cape)
I read an early copy of The Shards (Swift Press) by Bret Easton Ellis over Christmas last year and found it to be ideal fodder for the sacred week between the day itself and New Year’s Eve, when nobody is allowed to make demands of you. A novel that is both exhilaratingly brash and surprisingly thoughtful, it’s both a return to form and a new sort of genius for Easton Ellis. I love giving poetry books as gifts and I have given away Couplets (Faber) by Maggie Millner a dozen or so times this year. A novel in verse about, among other things, a woman leaving a longterm boyfriend for a woman and the new worlds that unfold before her, it’s hilarious and sexy and very human. I am excited at the prospect of receiving Sleepless (Fitzcarraldo), Marie Darrieussecq’s book about insomnia. Her surreal novel Pig Tales has haunted my imagination for many years.
Kevin Jared Hosein
Author of Hungry Ghosts (Bloomsbury)
The unfamiliar becoming the familiar – that’s one of my joys in reading I’d like to share. My first pick, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa(Bloomsbury), a tragicomic debut by Stephen Buoro, follows a teenage Nigerian boy who hopelessly fawns over white women. When he meets one, we’re able to deconstruct his uncanny fetish. My second, Shy (Faber) by Max Porter, follows a titular delinquent, weaving a jumble of forms and devices, shaping despair into something uniquely moody and a delight to read. Put My Sister, the Serial Killer (Atlantic) by Oyinkan Braithwaite in my stocking. Societal statements dressed up as genre always interest me.
Anne Enright
Author of The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape)
The Norton centenary edition of Rilke’s Lettersto a Young Poet is a beautiful hardback of an essential text and a great gift to any aspiring writer. It might be complemented by some terrific debut fiction from Nicole Flattery, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury), or Michael
Magee, Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton), and the most comforting book I read this year – Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger(Allen Lane), which tells of her slightly paranoid obsession with Naomi Wolf, her conspiracy theorist “double”. Klein catches that sense that the world has become fictional, but she manages to stay sane, interesting and trenchantly political throughout. In difficult times, this feels very empowering. As for a paperback in my stocking, there is actually one I need – it is called How to Read in Your Sleep: The Answer to All the Books in Your Hall.
Blake Morrison
Author of Two Sisters (Borough Press)
Ten years on from his death, it’s heartening to hear the great poet’s voice again in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber), brilliantly edited by Christopher Reid and a perfect gift. They’re letters dashed out at airports or on planes as he races round the globe: dutiful, generous, with a rare talent for friendship and no black marks. Also, Patrick Barkham’s The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin (Hamish Hamilton) is biography at its most inventive, mixing Deakin’s own writings with friends’ memories and improvisational add-ons to celebrate a bold and surprising life. For a stocking filler, Jane Feaver’s Crazy(Corsair) is one of the best novels I’ve read in years: obsessive, intimate and very funny.
Don Paterson
Author of Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber)
NB by JC (Carcanet) collects James Campbell’s fearless, gossipy, wise and brutally funny TLS columns in one handy volume, and reminds us what a lark book chat would be again if we all got off social media. It would make an excellent gift. I also loved Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound (Faber), her vivid, riveting account of 20th-century “outsider” composers. It is a parade of forgotten geniuses, mavericks and lunatics, mostly marginalised by the intensity of their own obsessive vision (or like Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peggy’s mother, the grinding mill of the patriarchy). And if Santa’s listening and I can find an elastic-free diabetic stocking, I’d like the late Louise Glück’s Poems: 1962–2020(Penguin Classics), a reassuringly chunky book that should cover the gaps in my reading of one of the few essential poetic voices of the past 50 years. If he can’t fit it in, I’ll take the great Fiona Hill’s memoir, ThereIs Nothing for You Here(Mariner).
Yiyun Li
Author of Wednesday’s Child (4th Estate)
The two hardbacks I would buy for friends are Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren(Jonathan Cape)and Idra Novey’s Take What You Need (Daunt),two brilliant and fierce novels featuring brilliant and fierce women characters, about the crossing (or uncrossing) of the most difficult border, that which exists within families. The paperback I would like for my own stocking is Mantel Pieces(HarperCollins), which I thought I would not read until I finish all the fiction by Hilary Mantel and now I’m getting close to that goal.
Richard Ford
Author of Be Mine (Bloomsbury)
I’ll be giving copies of Playhouse (Knopf) by Richard Bausch. This is a big, spacious novel you can immerse yourself in. Bausch is one of the US’s great literary realists and possesses a storywriter’s finesse and diamondpoint verbal deftness. Playhouse is full of vivid characters, intriguing/interesting intellectual threadings, much riveting incident, and Bausch’s incomparable wit on the page. Second, The Lock-Up(Faber)by John Banville. Here, the Booker prize winner has it all cooking: two careworn constabulary figures, now older and nicely repurposed from his previous policiers; a murdered Trinity College lady professor; settings stretching from the warn-torn Bavarian Alps to the cold, shadowy, secretkeeping purlieus of 1950s Dublin. It’s a novel you’ll want to sit down with on a chill and windy winter night and read all of. In my stocking I want The Moviegoerby Walker Percy. This 1961 masterpiece won the American National Book award, notably nosing out two other masterpieces, Catch-22 and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.Set in mid-century New Orleans at carnival time, it brilliantly, hilariously broke the grip held by the magisterial Faulkner when it came to portraying freshly the modern, southern, white ascendancy power structure in its creaky and often ridiculous decline.
Monica Heisey
Author of Really Good, Actually (4th Estate)
I’ve already bought several copies of Dolly Alderton’s Good Material (Fig Tree) for the men and women in my life, and I will continue the rampage through the festive season. It’s the perfect blend of easy to read, funny and extremely astute. Short stories make a great holiday gift – they’re the exact right thing to read during that hazy period between Christmas and new year, when no one is really doing anything, but your focus is sort of split between leftovers and television and vague plans for the year ahead. For this reason and many others, Tessa Hadley’s After the Funeral (Jonathan Cape) would be an ideal gift. The paperback I’d most like to receive is a beat-up old edition of something I already love – Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America(Faber), maybe, or Beloved (Vintage Classics) by Toni Morrison – with a gorgeous vintage cover.
Tania Branigan
Author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution(Faber)
I’ll be giving Shy (Faber) by Max Porter, which is addictive if (for all the right reasons) hard to read at times. It left me both hoping and fearing for this dangerous, vulnerable boy. For a friend who spurns fiction, it will be All That She Carried (Profile) by Tiya Miles. Despite documenting the horrors of slavery, it’s full of resilience and love – the devotion of an enslaved mother to the daughter stolen from her; the care with which the author imagines and explores their lost lives. And I’m crossing my fingers for Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance(Penguin Modern Classics).
Michael Magee
Author of Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton)
The Wren,the Wren (Jonathan Cape) by Anne Enright is one of my books of any year. It’s about womanhood, youth and that slow, painful, but joyous estrangement that emerges between mother and daughter as life runs its tumultuous course. I was also blown away by Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection: Witness(4th Estate). His sentences are sublime. His stories are monuments. I can’t stop thinking about them. I’d like a copy of Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories(Lynne Rienner)by Ghassan Kanafani in my Christmas stocking. I’ve read some stories online, but I want the book. I want to hold it in my hands.
Colin Grant
Author of I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Vintage)
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (WW Norton & Co) and Nicholas Rankin’s Trapped in History (Faber) show two writers prepared to do the heavy lifting to free us from our timid engagement with the past. Wilson’s elegant translation of Homer’s epic tragedy deepens our understanding of this bruising song of love and death. And in his dramatic account of Britain’s suppression of the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion, Rankin walks with ghosts unflinchingly into our shared history. A paperback but not lightweight, Yomi Sode’s Manorism (Penguin) excels as an innovative poetry collection that’s a tough but tender reflection on parenting, childhood and the transformative power of words.
Paul Harding
Author of This Other Eden(Hutchinson Heinemann)
Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s debut, Innards(Atlantic),is a batch of signs and wonders, delivered via lightning from Soweto. For vision, range, depth and voice, I can’t think of another collection that so knocked me out cold, story after story, all the way through. Your eyebrows will be singed and smoke will be coming out of your ears when you’re done.Ayana Mathis and I cross paths semi-regularly, and a point of commiseration over the last decade has been how slowly and painstakingly our writing has seemed to go. Now, her new novel, The Unsettled(Hutchinson Heinemann), is out in the world – published already in the US and out in the UK next spring – andI’d have gladly waited 20 years for a book this rich, deep, and huge-spirited. I’d love a paperback copy of John Cheever’s CollectedStories (Vintage Classics) in my holiday stocking, to replace the one I received for Christmas years ago. A lot of Cheever’s peers have dated terribly but I’m still haunted and thrilled by the best pieces in that book.
Nathan Thrall
Author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story (Allen Lane)
There could hardly be a more urgent time to understand the inner lives of Palestinians, which are depicted with poignance and grace in Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost(Jonathan Cape).I will be wrapping it together with a brilliant collection of political essays by one of our sharpest literary journalists, Adam Shatz, who takes us from Palestine to Paris inWriters and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso). As I finished writing A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a close friend asked if I had read another book about a school bus crash, Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter. I hadn’t, but now count Banks as one of my favourite writers. I’d be delighted to find any of his books in my stocking. What a loss that he passed away earlier this year.
Yomi Adegoke
Author of The List (4th Estate)
I’ll be giving people copies of The Black BritishQuiz Book (HarperCollins) by Sanae Elmed and Shay Loko, of Prtyhere. It’s an inclusive spin on the traditional game, testing general knowledge on things like food, history and music as well as much more niche trivia found in the deepest recesses of Black Twitter. It’s also packed with interesting facts for those wanting to learn something. Another good gift is The Pepperpot Diaries (Dorling Kindersley) by Andi Oliver. While I’m a notoriously dreadful cook, I did try her shrimp curry and syrup-drenched chicken wings recipes (not entirely prepared by me, thank God) and they were divine. I also want to be Andi Oliver when I grow up. The paperback I’d most like to receive in my stocking is Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (Faber), recently adapted for the stage at the Soho theatre. I like my books with flawed, difficult characters and have been warned the protagonist is a real piece of work, so she sounds right up my street.
Ian Penman
Author of Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors(Fitzcarraldo)
Roger Lewis wrote two of my favourite biographies, on Anthony Burgess and Charles Hawtrey, and Erotic Vagrancy:EverythingAbout Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Riverrun) falls somewhere between those two subjects. It is seriously vulgar – Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project reimagined by a 1960s gossip columnist. High, low, but never middlebrow, its cast includes: Roland Barthes, Benny Hill, Rachel Roberts, George Sanders, Muriel Spark, Andy Warhol and Kingsley Amis; ie it could have been written expressly for me. Any book by John Szwed or about Harry Smith is a must-read, so Szwed’s biography Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)is irresistible. Alchemy and magic, drink and drugs, Brecht and bebop, obsessive vinyl/book collecting, animated film, paper planes – there’s something here for all the family. In my Christmas stocking I would like to find anything by Fernanda Melchor and/or Gary Indiana.
To browse all of the books in the Observer and Guardian’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply