The books that will make the best Christmas presents
Our critics find something to suit every taste as they leaf through some of this year’s bestselling reads
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.
MUSIC by John Meagher Hit Factories by Karl Whitney (W&N, £20)
The Sunderland-based Dublin academic wrote the intriguing Hidden City about his hometown some years ago. His latest is a labour of love to the music that emerged from 10 British cities, including Manchester and Glasgow. As an urban geographer with a passion for music, Whitney is well placed to explain why certain cities punch above their weight culturally and why their physical form, history and accent helped shape the distinct music that the natives have made. There’s an especially intriguing chapter about Belfast and its greatest musical export, Van Morrison. You’ll want to listen to the music again — and visit these cities.
Wham! George & Me by Andrew Ridgeley (Michael Joseph, £20)
George Michael was such a force in the pop landscape of the 1980s that it’s easy to forget he wasn’t the only member of Wham!. Andrew Ridgeley was largely relegated to the shadows, and when the band split his career largely nose-dived. This very readable and frank memoir looks back on life with George as well as the challenging times he faced when the glare of the spotlight was turned away.
Acid for the Children by Flea (Headline, £20)
The Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist’s lively memoir takes a look at his early life and initial forays into music. He takes the reader on a wild journey from his birth city of Melbourne to his days as an aimless teenager in Los Angeles and on to his meeting with future band member Anthony Kiedis. To say he had a bizarre upbringing is an understatement and there were drugs — lots of drugs.
The Final Days of EMI by Eamonn Forde (Omnibus, £20)
EMI was once one of the world’s great record companies, a giant that was home to everyone from the Beatles to Radiohead. Then the internet arrived and a decades-long business model was destroyed virtually overnight.
Forde’s fascinating book gives a sense of where it all went wrong and how disastrous decisions helped to hasten its demise. It’s a cautionary tale for those record companies that have managed to survive the apocalypse.
Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn by Brett Anderson (Little, Brown, £18.99)
The Suede frontman proved himself to be a gifted writer with Coal Black Mornings, last year’s account of his early life and times. This second volume takes up the story from the time that Suede went from also-rans to the most talked-about band in Britain in the early 1990s. His account of the Britpop years is captivating, especially when he looks back on his extraordinary creative partnership with ex-bandmate Bernard Butler.
LITERARYFICTION by Hilary A White (HAW), Henrietta McKervey (HMK) Hannah Stephenson (HS) Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)
Those who love to envelope themselves in literary gems should consider this year’s other
Booker winner, which follows 12 very different people, mostly black British women, moving through the world in different decades whose intergenerational stories connect down the years, raising questions about the issues of feminism and race. HS
The Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer Hickey (Atlantic, £14.99)
Cape Cod, 1950. Michael, a 10-year-old orphaned survivor of a concentration camp is packed off for the summer as companion to
Richie, whose father died in the war.
Failing to get along with Richie, Michael instead strikes up a friendship with artist Josephine Hopper, who lives nearby. Volatile and difficult, Jo believes her career has been sacrificed to that of her husband, and hates her identity as ‘Mrs Edward Hopper’. While she rages and destroys, Edward withdraws, and Michael struggles with the trauma of his early years. Dwyer Hickey moves from one character to another with empathy and care, showing each person for the lonely, frightened human they are. A brilliant exploration of love, relationships and creativity from one of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers. HMK
This Is Happiness by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
It might have been pipped to the Irish Books Awards post by Shadowplay, but this 10th novel from Clare-based Niall Williams had a major case to argue. Picking up from 2014’s Booker-longlisted History of the Rain, it plonks us in the fictional 1950s village of Faha, switches off the precipitation, and watches with a gently bemused eye as electrification arrives. Sharp as a tack, bright as a button, and engorged with rich humour, this is a love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone. Williams conjures these characters to life through sublime use of language, and proceeds to make them dance off the page without ever resorting to ugliness or violence. Plenty of both in the world, God knows. HAW
Shadowplay provides a beguiling backstory to Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Gothic masterpiece which has been continuously in print since
1897. O’Connor’s cast of actor and impresario
Sir Henry Irving, legendary actress
Ellen Terry, and theatre manager Stoker play out a compelling triangular relationship on and off stage at London’s Lyceum Theatre. Tender, imaginative, and often laugh-out-loud funny, O’Connor’s beautifully lyrical writing will leave you calling for an encore. HMK
The River Capture by Mary Costello (Canongate, £14.99)
Costello confirmed her place as a writer of extraordinary vision with this strange, beautiful and elliptical character portal that felt like a natural heir to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. As a modernist take on the
Irish country novel — see how it emulsifies with
Ulysses the longer it continues — The
River Capture moved in elliptical patterns that made it deeply absorbing as it propelled itself along. Few writers produce second novels as bold and unorthodox. Fewer still succeed. HAW
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, £20)
A Booker shortlisting for Quichotte was a reminder that the great migrant writer is not a member of literary aristocracy for nothing. Rushdie’s 14th novel also showed what he is capable of when he allows himself to go off-piste and follow flights of fancy. This rewriting of Cervantes’ monument undulates its way from unruly ebullience into razor-edged satire and even warped sci-fi, as Rushdie prances through the bizarre times we live in. HAW
The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)
“We could begin with a bullet and the gun which fired it...” A slight cheat here, as Julian Barnes takes his novelist’s scalpel to the
(real) life of 19th-century society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and bon viveur Samuel Pozzi, but the book’s structure and style mean it can be enjoyed as historical fiction. Erudite and playful, with a light-handed disregard for questions of fact, Barnes’ trademark elegant prose makes delightful work of this Belle Époque drama. HMK
You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
In the same year the rainbow nation wins the Rugby World Cup, it is only right and proper that the Great South
African Novel is also published. Damian Barr’s debut planted its feet in the Boer Wars and used their haunting legacy to tell of the changing shape of South African society across generations. A deep and calcified darkness is exposed in starkly human language through Barr’s thematic weave and excellent character voicing. HAW
Things in Jars by Jess Kidd (Canongate, £14.99)
From the first line, Things in Jars is a rollercoaster of imagination and wit.
Bridie Devine is a pipe-smoking Victorian lady detective and “captain of herself ”, challenged to take on the roughest, toughest of cases: a kidnapped child, who supposedly doesn’t exist. Traipsing behind her is amorous ghost Ruby Doyle, dressed only in a top hat, unlaced boots and white drawers. Showmen and surgeons, mermaids and merrows… Kidd’s writing is never less than surprising and original. HMK
POPULARFICTION By Meadhbh McGrath (MMG) & Tanya Sweeney (TS) Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, £14.99)
The contradictory, cantankerous anti-heroine
Olive Kitteridge returns more than a decade after she was first introduced in
Strout’s novel 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.
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 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 their trail, friendship and develop newfound confidence to face their own problems.
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Trapeze, £12.99)
We meet our titular heroine during a gynaecological exam, an early indicator of Carty-Williams’s unflinching frankness about everything from sexuality to mental health to racism. Queenie is flailing following a break (really a break-up) from Tom, her nice, normal, white boyfriend, which sets her on a darkly comic, often painful quest for a new man. Carty-Williams handles her complex character with striking nuance, balancing riotous hu
mour with quietly devastating insights on loneliness, self-worth and family, as Queenie struggles to forgive her mother for the nightmare that was her childhood. Carty-Williams effortlessly weaves in vivid commentary on everyday racism, gentrification and stereotypes about black women’s bodies in a way that feels essential yet never preachy. A superb debut, and a truly fresh voice in fiction. MMG
Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire Books, £18.99)
This book, about a narcissistic divorcee in modern-day Manhattan, was one of the most hyped books of the year.
And with good reason: Brodesser-Akner, a
New York
Times journalist, offered a book that was low on lovable characters but high on insight into the human condition. Here, Toby Fleishman is a hepatologist, divorcing from his super-agent wife, Rachel. Freshly introduced to the embarrassment of riches that Tinder dating promises, Fleishman is intoxicated and cowed by what’s on offer. The only thing in his way of enjoying the sexual bounty full-throttle is that he has custody of his two kids, Solly and Libby. And when Rachel fails to pick them up at the designated time, and then refuses to answer her phone, Fleishman is plunged into a whole new world of peril. TS
So Lucky by Dawn O’Porter (HarperCollins, £14.99)
After giving female friendship and online shaming a going-over in her previous novel, former journalist/broadcaster O’Porter turns her attention to the complexities of Insta-artifice. Our two heroines, Beth and Ruby, seem for all intents and purposes like they are living dream lives on their own terms, but their social media output, and everything else they put out to the outside world, only tells half the story. TS
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) Nicholls re-energises the coming-of-age story with this gorgeously tender summer romance. It’s nostalgic without tipping into sentimentality: set in 1997, it’s got Britpop,
Lynx deodorant applied in
“a coat as thick as the icing on a wedding cake”, and no smartphones. Charlie meets Fran at that most hellish of settings: an amateur theatre group, staging a student production of Romeo and Juliet. Nicholls hilariously recounts the trust exercises and pre-show rituals, yet there are poignant reflections on young love and family conflict, too. MMG
Expectation by Anna Hope (Doubleday, £12.99)
Anna Hope is already being touted as the next Sally Rooney, and Expectation has already been breathlessly described as a generation-defining book. Instead of young love, it’s female friendship that ends up under the microscope. Hannah, Cate and Lisa live in an East London energised by art, activism and the ideals of the young. Life crushes each of the friends underfoot to varying degrees, and the three of them can’t help but look at each other to see where they went wrong, or right, in life. TS
When All Is Said by Anne Griffin (Sceptre, £8.99)
By all accounts, Griffin’s debut was inspired by a chance encounter with an elderly man in a bar, who told her that he’d expected the night to be his last. Here, eight-year-old Maurice Griffin lines up five drinks in a hotel bar, toasting the five individuals who have been most influential in his life. Absolutely riveting, full of humanity and the sort of confident debut that shows Griffin as one to keep an eye out for. TS
Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Arrow)
The gripping oral history of a Fleetwood Macstyle band from the 1970s features plenty of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, in the form of an album of lyrics at the back of the book. Even with its transcript format, the characters feel like real people and the willthey-won’t-they tension is almost palpable. It’s set to become a TV series, produced by Reese Witherspoon with Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough in the title role. But can they get the music right? MMG
THRILLERS by Myles McWeeney The Lying Room by Nicci French (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)
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 exciting escape from the TV reruns.
The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver (HarperCollins, £20)
It’s a red-letter day when Jeffery Deaver, the master of devious plotting and nerve-jangling suspense, develops a new character, and Colter Shaw is a standout creation. Brought up totally off the grid in the Sierra Nevada wilderness, Shaw is really good at finding missing people.
When we first meet him, he is trying to save a kidnapped woman trapped in a sinking boat. Her abductor is playing out in real life the storylines of a new virtual reality video game called Immersion. Colter must swiftly get to grips with modern technology to penetrate the complex world of VR gaming if he is to stop a crazed killer and bring a megalomaniac tech billionaire to book.
Scrublands by Chris Hammer (Wildfire, £16.99)
In the drought-stricken Australian outback, a young priest sensationally commits a mass shooting amongst his congregation before being shot dead by the local policeman.
A year later journalist
Martin Scarsden is sent to write a colour piece on how the town and its inhabitants are coping with the tragedy. He finds a community with a lot to hide and two further bodies hidden in the local dam. A brilliant, deftly plotted debut packed with welldrawn characters.
The Body in the Castle Well by Martin Walker (Quercus, £20)
When the body of Claudia Mueller,
a young Yale student working on the archives of a wealthy crippled war veteran and eminent art historian, is found in the well of his chateau in the little town of St Denis, local Chief of Police Bruno Courreges is under pressure because of her connections to the White
House. His investigations turn up connections to Occupation art looting and France’s dark war in Algeria.
The Bitterroots by CJ Box (Head of Zeus, £18.99)
Multi-award-winning CJ Box, creator of the mesmerising Wyoming game warden ‘Joe Pickett’ series, has developed a new character. Cassie Dewell, former cop and single mother, is a PI working out of Bozeman, Montana, when she comes up against the ruthlessly powerful Kleinsasser ranching clan, whose scion is accused of raping his niece. When Cassie refuses to stop her investigations, the final confrontation between the two is as nail-bitingly tense and dramatic as one could wish for.
The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney (Quercus, £12.99)
Abbie, wife of a billionaire founder of a Silicon Valley AI start-up, wakes up from an induced five-year coma. She’s fine, her husband assures her. But she’s not sure she’s herself: could she possibly be a machine, the sum of all the real-life Abbie’s experiences, memories and emotions uploaded into a hugely complex robot? One of the most original thrillers published this year.
POPULARSCIENCE by Darragh McManus Origins by Lewis Dartnell (The Bodley Head, £20)
English scientist Dartnell looks at “how the earth made us”: climate, geology, evolution, tectonic shift, atomic structure, the precious metals which drive modern technology, and a host of other areas. Origins is packed with jaw-dropping information and fascinating insights into how a group of savannah-dwelling apes decided to walk on two feet and then colonise the planet. He brings it all back to the source, in the best traditions of Jared Diamond et al. So we learn that slight tilts in the angle of the earth’s axis occasioned certain climate changes that then impacted on landscape that altered our ancestors’ behaviour. In other words, celestial motion led to civilisation.
Underland by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £20)
A dreamlike, impressionistic delve beneath the surface of the planet, wrought in superbly stylish prose. Using the concept of ‘deep time’ — the millions- and billions-long geological ages — as a supporting structure, Macfarlane visits undersea mining operations, travels to frozen Greenland to see what lies beneath the ice, traverses the eerie catacombs of Paris, and finds out how nuclear waste can be buried safely away from our faroff descendants.
The Moon by Oliver Morton (Economist Books, £20)
Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, Oliver Morton’s book is a lovely thing — rather like its subject. He takes in natural history, literature, cosmology, mythology and much else while exploring this shining silver satellite. Especially interesting, given the occasion, are the parts on man’s dreams of landing or living on the moon. We stopped voyaging there in 1972 — but Morton reckons that was only a hiatus.
Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution by Lee Smolin (Allen Lane, £25)
Quantum mechanics is so incomprehensibly weird that, as someone quipped, “Anyone who says they understand quantum… doesn’t understand quantum.”
Physicist Lee Smolin has serious issues with one of its weirdest contentions: that there’s no physical reality beyond what is observed. Too solipsistic, too anthropocentric; too much like magic or fairy tales. In this mind-bending read, he endeavours to prove something really is out there, just as Einstein believed.
The Nocturnal Brain by Dr Guy Leschziner (Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
Leschziner specialises in sleep, and this books mixes the latest neurological research on the subject with some bizarre true stories of insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, sleep apnoea, hallucinations and even paralysis. Life may well be just a dream, as the nursery rhyme has it, but these conditions are very real, and Leschziner is an affable guide to it all.