Gift Guide · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books to Gift for Christmas
A book is the easiest present to give badly. Buy one off the table by the till and you have handed someone an obligation; buy one you loved without thinking about them and you have handed them a comment on their life. So this list is not ordered by how good the books are. It is ordered by who you are giving them to — the colleague, the person who reads more than you do, the one who says they never read, the one who wants to vanish for a week. At the bottom are two books I recommend constantly and would not put under a tree, and why.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Grouped by who you are giving them to · Fiction & Non-fiction
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The easy ones
If they say they never read
Famous, readable, and no homework. The point of these two is that nobody has to admit to anything: both are books people are glad to be given, and both are enjoyable from the first page rather than from page eighty.
The Great Gatsby
Scribner published it on 10 April 1925 and a standard edition runs to about two hundred pages. Since 1 January 2021 the book has been in the public domain in the United States, which is why there are suddenly so many clothbound and illustrated editions of it and why they cost so little.
This is the best value gift on the whole list, and it is not close. A beautiful hardback of a book everyone has heard of, for the price of a paperback, at a length nobody can call homework. Buy the nicest-looking edition you can find rather than the cheapest — with this one the object is half the present.
Kitchen Confidential
It grew out of an essay Bourdain sent the New Yorker unsolicited in 1999, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This”. It is his third book: the novels Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997) came first.
For anyone who cooks, anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant, and anyone who says they do not read. It is funny on the first page, which is the only test that matters for a present. Do not give it to someone who wants their illusions about restaurants left intact.
The safe ones
If you do not know them well
A colleague, an in-law, the person whose name you drew. These two are chosen for the same reason: they are very good, very widely liked, and they make no claim about the person receiving them.
The Remains of the Day
It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and Ishiguro went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Around two hundred and sixty pages.
If I had to name one novel that is safe to give to almost any adult, it is this. It is short, it is quietly devastating, and the prizes on the cover do the reassuring for you. A butler looks back on a life of service and slowly realises what it cost him — nobody has ever been offended by receiving that.
The Nightingale
Two sisters in occupied France. By 2021 it had been published in forty-five languages and sold more than four and a half million copies, and it spent twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The one to give when you want the present to land rather than to impress. This is the book my own recommendations get compared against by people who do not read the way I do, and it wins more often than I would like to admit. Reliable, emotional, and hard to put down.
The object
For the reader who has everything
When the person already owns every book you would think of, give them one that is worth having as a thing. Both of these are better in hardback, and both were made by someone who was an artist before anything else.
Poor Things
Gray designed and illustrated the book himself, and then had the text pretend the illustrations were by the Scottish artist William Strang. It won the Whitbread in the novel category and the Guardian Fiction Prize, both in 1992. Yorgos Lanthimos’s film came out in December 2023.
A Glasgow Frankenstein, funny and strange and formally silly in the best way. Give it to the reader who has stopped being surprised. One warning before you buy: check the edition you are ordering actually reproduces Gray’s drawings, because not every printing makes that clear and the drawings are half the pleasure.
Just Kids
Her account of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, written because he asked her to. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010.
For anyone who makes anything, and for anyone who once wanted to. It is a book about being young and broke and certain, which is a thing people like being reminded of in December. The photographs matter, so buy it in hardback if you can.
The long ones
For someone who wants to disappear for a week
For a lot of people the holidays are one of the few stretches in the year with uninterrupted time in them. Two of these three are long on purpose. The third is not especially long and still does not let go.
Demon Copperhead
A recasting of Dickens’s David Copperfield in Appalachia. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded in 2023, shared that year with Trust by Hernan Diaz, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023.
The rare book that satisfies the reader who wants prizes and the reader who wants a story they cannot stop. It is about the opioid epidemic and foster care, so it is not light, but it moves the way a nineteenth-century novel moves, because it is built like one.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Five hundred and seventy-six pages, his first novel, and Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club on 19 September 2008.
A mute boy, a family that breeds dogs, and a plot that turns out to be Hamlet. This is the one I give to people who complain that nothing absorbs them any more. It takes about sixty pages to close over your head and then you are gone until it lets you out.
Educated
Westover grew up among survivalists in rural Idaho and did not set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen; she took a doctorate in intellectual history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2014. It is her first book. It went straight to number one on the New York Times list and stayed on the hardcover non-fiction list for more than two years, and it was a finalist both for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and for that body’s John Leonard Prize for a first book.
The book on this page that most people are simply delighted to be given: it reads like a novel and it is the one that non-readers actually finish. The caveat is what it is about. It is a family coming apart, and her parents have disputed her account in print, so it is not the book for someone who is in the middle of something like that themselves. For everyone else it is about as safe as a memoir gets.
The reciprocal
For the one who always gives you a book
The hardest person on the list, because they read more than you do. The move is not to out-read them but to pick something you can defend — a book with an argument behind it, or one they have heard of for years and never got to. Not the thing at the front of the shop, which they saw before you did.
An American Marriage
Published in February 2018, chosen for Oprah’s Book Club that same month, and it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019.
A marriage of a year and a half, then a wrongful conviction, then a twelve-year sentence of which he serves five before it is overturned. Jones refuses to make anyone the villain, which is what makes it hurt. Give it to the reader who wants to argue about a book afterwards, because this one is built for that.
Bel Canto
Built on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima in 1996 and 1997, which Patchett watched on the news and thought was operatic. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, both in 2002.
A siege that turns into something close to a household. It is the most generous novel on this list and the one people are most surprised to love. If your reader has somehow missed it, this is the year.
The exception
One I would not put under the tree
This one is on the page because people ask for it, and the honest answer is that it is a wonderful book and a bad Christmas present. A book that asks someone to change how they think is a request rather than a gift, unless they asked for it first. The same goes for anything about surviving something: handed over at a table full of family it reads as a diagnosis of the person opening it, however kindly it was meant.
Give this one out of season, one to one, and say why you are giving it. That is the whole difference between a present and a comment.
The Power of Now
A small press in Vancouver published it in 1997. New World Library reissued it in 1999, and that is the edition that sold: around sixteen million copies by 2025. Oprah Winfrey listed it as recommended reading in O, her magazine, in 2000 — it was never a Book Club selection. That was A New Earth, in 2008.
Either it does nothing for you or it changes something, and there is no way to tell in advance which it will be for the person you are giving it to. That is a fine thing to risk on a friend who has asked for it and a poor thing to risk on a gift table.
If you only have five minutes in the shop
You know nothing about them
→ The Remains of the Day. Short, prize on the cover, nobody has ever been offended by it.
They say they do not read
→ The Great Gatsby, in the best-looking edition you can find. Two hundred pages and it looks like it cost three times what it did.
They read more than you do
→ Bel Canto or An American Marriage. Both have an argument behind them, and both are books people want to talk about afterwards.
They want to vanish for a week
→ The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Five hundred and seventy-six pages and it closes over your head around page sixty.
They have every book already
→ Poor Things, in a printing that keeps Gray’s drawings.
Giving books at Christmas, in short
- Jólabókaflóð
- Iceland’s Christmas book flood. Publishers put the year’s new titles out in autumn, everyone gets a book on Christmas Eve, and the evening is spent reading. It started in 1944, when the Icelandic Publishers Association sent its book catalogue free to every household — not out of romance but because wartime import restrictions had stripped the shops of most other goods, while paper was one of the few things still coming in
- How much of a year that is
- The Christmas season accounts for roughly forty per cent of Iceland’s annual book sales, and the four months around the holidays for about half of them
- The cheapest beautiful gift
- The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2021, which is why clothbound and illustrated editions of it are suddenly everywhere and cost almost nothing
- The safest cover
- A prize on the jacket does the reassuring for you when you do not know someone’s taste. Six books on this page carry one. See the prize calendar if you want to shop that way
- The one rule
- Give the book you would want to talk about afterwards. A present nobody mentions again was a transaction
One of the twelve books on this page is one I would not actually put under a tree. It is at the bottom, under a heading that says so. A book about trauma handed over in front of an audience reads as a comment on the person receiving it, however kindly it was meant, and that is worth saying out loud on a page like this one.
Frequently asked questions about giving books at Christmas
What are the best books to give for Christmas?
The ones that look like a present and make no claim about the person opening them. On this page that means The Great Gatsby for anyone, The Remains of the Day for someone whose taste you do not know, Poor Things or Just Kids for the reader who has everything, and Demon Copperhead or The Story of Edgar Sawtelle for the person who wants to disappear into something long over the holidays. The full reasoning for each one is above.
How do you choose a book for someone whose taste you do not know?
Work from the occasion rather than from the person. You are not trying to find their favourite book, which you cannot do without knowing them; you are trying to find something they will be glad to be given. That means short rather than long, well known rather than obscure, and a story rather than an argument. A prize on the jacket helps, because it says someone else has vouched for this and you are not asking them to take your word for it.
What do you give someone who says they never read?
The Great Gatsby, and I would not give it a second thought. It is about two hundred pages, everyone has heard of it, nobody can claim it is homework, and because it has been in the public domain in the United States since 2021 you can buy a genuinely beautiful hardback of it for very little. Kitchen Confidential is the other one: it is funny on the first page, which is the only test that matters for a present.
Should you give a book about grief or trauma at Christmas?
No, and this is the one piece of advice on this page I would hold to. A book about someone surviving something is often exactly the book I would recommend, but handed over at a table full of family it reads as a diagnosis of the person opening it, however kindly it was meant. Give that kind of book privately, at another moment, to someone you know is ready for it, and say why you are giving it. That is the difference between a present and a comment. The same goes for a book that asks the reader to change how they think, which is why The Power of Now is at the bottom of this page rather than in one of the groups above it.
What is Jólabókaflóð?
The Icelandic Christmas book flood. New titles are published in the autumn, books are given on Christmas Eve, and the evening is spent reading them. It began in 1944, when the Icelandic Publishers Association started sending a book catalogue free to every household — the reason was that wartime import quotas had stripped the shops of most other goods, and paper was one of the few things not rationed. It has stuck: the Christmas season is still around forty per cent of the Icelandic book trade’s year.
Are prize-winning books good presents?
They are good presents for people whose taste you do not know, for exactly one reason: the prize does the vouching so you do not have to. Six books on this page carry one. They are not automatically the books you would give to someone whose taste you do know — for that person the better move is usually the odd one, the thing they would not have picked up themselves.
Is it rude to give a book you have already read?
The opposite. A book you have read and want to talk about is the only kind worth giving; a book chosen off a bestseller table is a transaction. Write in the front of it what you thought. That is the part people keep.
What about giving a book to a colleague?
Stay on the safe side of the list. The Remains of the Day, Bel Canto or The Nightingale are all books an adult is pleased to receive and none of them says anything about the person getting it. What I would avoid for a colleague is memoir about somebody’s illness, grief or recovery — you do not know what they are carrying, and a present is a bad way to find out. Memoir about a life rather than about a wound is fine: Just Kids and Kitchen Confidential both work.
Is a second-hand book an acceptable gift?
Yes, if it is in good condition and you say something about it. An old edition of a book you love, with a note in the front, beats a new copy of a book you have not read. The exception is the person who minds — and you usually know who they are.
How many books should you give?
One, chosen properly. Three books mean you could not decide, and the recipient feels the obligation of all three. If you want to give more than one, give a book and something that goes with it rather than two books.
Footnotes
The Great Gatsby 3 facts
Charles Scribner’s Sons published it on 10 April 1925.
A current Simon & Schuster edition runs to 208 pages, which is where “about two hundred pages” on this page comes from; other editions vary, and now that the book is out of copyright in the United States there are a great many of them.
It entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2021, together with the rest of the class of 1925. That is what has made cheap illustrated and clothbound editions of it so common, and it is a fact about American copyright, not about every country.
Public Domain Day 2021 — Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke Law
Kitchen Confidential 2 facts
Bloomsbury published it in 2000, and it is Anthony Bourdain’s third book: the novels Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997) came first.
It grew out of “Don’t Eat Before Reading This”, an essay he sent the New Yorker unsolicited, published on 19 April 1999. I could not load the New Yorker’s own archive page, so the date here rests on a reference work rather than on the magazine.
The Remains of the Day 3 facts
Faber and Faber published it in 1989 and it won the Booker Prize that year.
Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.
The page count of about 260 is from a reference work; Faber’s own product page does not publish an extent.
The Nightingale 1 fact
St. Martin’s Press published it in February 2015. By 2021 it had appeared in 45 languages and sold more than 4.5 million copies, and it spent twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Both figures are a 2021 snapshot from a reference work — neither the publisher nor the New York Times states them where I could reach it, and the true total is certainly higher by now.
Poor Things 4 facts
Bloomsbury published it in 1992. It won the Whitbread award in the novel category and the Guardian Fiction Prize, both for 1992. In 1992 the prize was still the Whitbread — it only became the Costa in 2006 — so this page uses the name it had at the time.
Gray designed and illustrated the book himself, and the text attributes the illustrations to the Scottish artist William Strang as part of the joke.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s film was released in December 2023.
This page tells you to check that the edition you buy reproduces the drawings, and that is deliberate: the book is in print in more than one paperback, and no publisher page I could load states edition by edition whether the illustrations are included.
Just Kids 2 facts
Ecco published it in 2010 and it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year.
It is her account of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, written because he asked her to.
Demon Copperhead 3 facts
Harper published it in 2022 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded in 2023, shared that year with Trust by Hernan Diaz.
The Pulitzer citation describes it as a recasting of David Copperfield narrated by an Appalachian boy.
It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle 2 facts
Ecco published it in June 2008. It is 576 pages and it is his first novel.
Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club on 19 September 2008. Oprah’s own site refused the request, so this rests on a reference work.
Educated 5 facts
Random House published it on 20 February 2018, Hutchinson in Britain on the same day. The American hardcover runs to 352 pages and the British edition to 400. It is her first book.
She grew up among survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, did not set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen, and took a doctorate in intellectual history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2014, as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
It debuted at number one on the New York Times list and stayed on the hardcover non-fiction list for more than two years. This page gives no sales figure: the publisher says four million copies and a much higher number circulates elsewhere without a source worth citing, so the honest thing is to say how long it sold rather than how much.
It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography for 2018 and for the same body’s John Leonard Prize for a first book. It won neither: the autobiography award went to Nora Krug’s Belonging and the John Leonard Prize to Tommy Orange’s There There. Plenty of pages call it a winner of one or the other, and that is where this page differs from them.
Her parents, Val and LaRee Westover, have disputed her account through their attorney, who told a Utah newspaper that the book “falsely portrays the Westover family” while allowing that there is “a little germ of truth” in it, and who rejected what is said in it about her parents’ health. Her mother later published her own memoir. This page says that the account is disputed and by whom; it does not adjudicate between them.
Educated should be read with grain of salt, says family’s attorney — Herald Journal
An American Marriage 3 facts
Algonquin Books published it in February 2018, and it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection that same month.
It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019.
Roy is sentenced to twelve years and the publisher’s own description says the conviction is overturned after five, which is why this page gives both numbers rather than the sentence alone.
Bel Canto 3 facts
HarperCollins published it in 2001. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002 — that is the name the Women’s Prize carried at the time — and the PEN/Faulkner Award the same year.
The Women’s Prize lists Ann Patchett as its 2002 winner. Its own timeline prints every year under the prize’s current name, which is why this page gives the 2002 name separately.
It was built on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima in 1996 and 1997.
The Power of Now 2 facts
Namaste Publishing published it in Vancouver in 1997 and New World Library reissued it in 1999; that is the edition that sold. Around sixteen million copies as of 2025.
Oprah Winfrey listed it as recommended reading in O, The Oprah Magazine in 2000. It was never an Oprah’s Book Club selection: the Tolle book she chose for the Book Club was A New Earth, in 2008.
Giving books at Christmas 2 facts
Jólabókaflóð, the Icelandic Christmas book flood, began in 1944 when the Icelandic Publishers Association sent its catalogue, Bókatíðindi, free to every household. The reason was economic rather than sentimental: wartime quotas and restrictions limited what could be imported, and paper was one of the few commodities not rationed, so books were what there was to give.
Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood Is a Force of Nature — Smithsonian Magazine
The Christmas season accounts for about forty per cent of Iceland’s annual book sales, and the four months around the holidays for roughly half.
Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood Is a Force of Nature — Smithsonian Magazine
Last verified 24 September 2026. Every publisher, date, prize and figure above has a source next to it. The recommendations themselves are judgements and not facts, and they are the part you should disagree with. Where a figure is a snapshot that will drift — copies sold, most obviously — the footnote says so rather than pretending the number is permanent. Where a source I would have preferred refused the request, the footnote names what I used instead. What you will not find here are exact prices, ISBNs or links to one particular printing: those change faster than a page can be kept honest, which is also why the advice is to look at the edition in front of you rather than to order the one I happened to see.
Where to go next
Other ways to pick a book on this site.
Overview
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Every gift list on this site, by occasion and by person.
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This year’s books, if you want something new.
Overview
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Every reading list on this site, organised by year.
Prizes
The Literary Prize Calendar
Every date, and which prize to follow if you shop by jacket.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that stay with you longest.
Bookshelf
My Bookshelf
Everything I have written about, in one place.
From the bookshelf
The best present is the one you want to talk about afterwards
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books worth giving at any time of year, not only in December.
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