Forget socks. Leave the Next voucher. Put the Terry’s Chocolate Orange down. If chosen wisely, a book is the very best present you can give to someone you love. As the festive season arrives, Indy writers share the literary gifts they like to place under the tree.
The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Perhaps annoyingly for them, I’m always trying to curate my friends’ bookshelves; if I find myself reading a good book, my brain starts to fill with the names of people I’d like to give it to. Of course, I’m aware that giving someone a book as a gift runs the risk of feeling like you’re actually giving them homework, so it’s important you get it right. What you want to give, really, are a few hours of unalloyed pleasure – anything more (“this book changed my life!” sort of experiences) would be a magical bonus.
Maybe because of my job, maybe because I once Christmas temped at Waterstones, I love choosing different books for different people each year. Short story collections are good, because you can dip in and out of them – I’ve given Katherine Heiny’s mordantly funny Single, Carefree, Mellow to friends I knew would get a kick out of it. Also, it’s hard to beat a really, really good novel – Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is my current tip for a read no one I know could put down. Sometimes when you think you’ve absolutely nailed it, you will get it wrong: I bought my Newcastle-supporting partner a copy of Paul Ferris’s very well-reviewed memoir The Boy on the Shed, about his journey from St James’ Park midfielder to barrister, and it sits unread five years later (I guess Alan Shearer’s recommendation meant nothing).
My pro tip for a Christmassy reading gift, though, would be Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles – this five-volume family saga, in which children are naughty and their parents are naughtier, is the epitome of comfort reading. Obviously, giving someone a set of five massive books is ludicrous, intimidating and presumptuous – so, here’s what you do: give them the first instalment, The Light Years. You know they’ll love it, and when they do, you buy them the set, and they get to give the first book away to someone else they know who will love it. The cycle happily continues. Jessie Thompson, arts editor
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
The book I’ve given away most, to so many of my beloved female friends, is Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. It’s the second in a memoir trilogy by the novelist, poet and playwright – and I would argue it’s not just a joy to read, it is absolutely vital. If you’ve ever woken in the dead of night and wondered about womanhood, about your place in the world – about domestic harmony and disharmony, divorce or what it means to be “mother” – then it’s essential reading. The first time I opened it, I ended up staying on the Circle line on the Tube the whole way round, to finish it. I have read it and re-read it, cried and nodded, underlined passages and read them out loud. It is pleasure and it is grief, all at once. But mostly, it is about living. Every woman should read it, so I give it to the women I love. Victoria Richards, Voices editor
Reunion by Fred Uhlman
This is a very slim book with a slow-burning fuse that explodes with pathos and surprise. Reunion by Fred Uhlman was written in 1960 in a tiny edition and is really a novella, but now a Penguin classic. It packs a punch to make it unforgettable, a compelling narrative of historical significance. Do not read the foreword or try to guess or find out the ending. It is set in 1938 in Germany when a 16-year-old Jewish schoolboy befriends another boy. It is gentle and shocking and very short: the perfect stocking filler. Geordie Greig, editor-in-chief
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
This book taught me about love, loss and writing. It’s a timeless classic based on Ephron’s disastrous divorce from her second husband, Carl Bernstein, who famously had an affair with Margaret Jay, the daughter of former British prime minister James Callaghan. With thinly disguised portraits of her ex-husband and his Other Woman, Heartburn is a hilarious, vivid take on womanhood, relationships, and food (the protagonist, Rachel Samstat, is a food writer). I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh and a literary upgrade to Love Actually this Christmas. Olivia Petter, features writer
A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
I have gifted this novel to countless friends, colleagues and once, I gave a copy to someone I truly disliked in the hope it would improve him. In A Question of Upbringing, which is the first volume in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series, you are launched into an interwar world of Carl Jung-obsessed generals, communist Oxford dons, dodgy speculator uncles and cryptofascists. Your guide is a privileged young man called Nicholas Jenkins who is desperate for a bohemian life and to meet girls.
While there are profound moments through this and later volumes, this is a truly funny book. If you like Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, this is a perfect gift. If you haven’t read the writers above, this is just a bloody great book. Finally, this book introduces you to Kenneth Widmerpool. Once you meet him, he is a character you will then see again and again in people you meet. Matt Payton, head of audience (editorial)
Educated by Tara Westover
Tara Westover, author of ‘Educated’
I’m just going to get one important thing out of the way first – this book is not very Christmassy. But it’s a great gift. Westover’s memoir Educated, which spans from her father’s scrapyard in Idaho to the halls of Cambridge’s Trinity College, is beautiful, heart-wrenching, horrifying at times, and inspiring. It reads like a novel – in large part because you can’t believe some of the things Westover went through – and recounts her efforts to break out from the constraints of her survivalist Mormon family in order to, well, get an education. A truly astonishing work of writing that will have you gasping, and feeling a bit braver with every page. Ellie Harrison, TV editor
Lint by Steve Aylett
I’m a naturally anxious person, and one particularly recurring fear is giving someone a gift that they already own. That’s one reason I’ve found myself doling out copies of Steve Aylett’s Lint on several occasions – it’s a fairly safe bet your friend or loved one has never heard of it. But a second, and much better, reason, is that this book’s a blast. Aylett is one of the UK’s most imaginative literary mavericks, and Lint, a wholly fictionalised biography of science fiction writer Jeff Lint, is hilarious, absurd and relentless in its comic momentum. Louis Chilton, culture writer
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Nora Ephron and her book ‘Heartburn’
Daniel Finkelstein, author of ‘Everything in Moderation’
