The best books to buy as presents this Christmas
From crime thrillers to cookery, we’ve handpicked some brilliant books to buy for your friends and family this festive season.
From crime thrillers to cookery, we’ve handpicked some brilliant books to buy for your friends and family this festive season.
Various authors (RRP £22, Penguin)
I bow to no man in my love for PG Wodehouse, but if Roddy Doyle and Frank Skinner want to play fast and loose with his priceless creations, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, why not?
Fun and frolics for the festive season as flights of fancy waft us from wartime Bletchley Park to the present day.
Alexandra Benedict (RRP £16.99, Simon & Schuster)
Whatever your festive plans, don’t invite puzzle compiler Edie O’Sullivan. Wherever she goes, it’s mayhem. This year it’s a hotel on a Scottish island for more blue murder and red herrings.
Can Edie solve the clues in the victims’ Christmas crackers? Can you find the song and film titles hidden in the text?
FL Everett (RRP £9.99, Cornerstone)
Driving home to London across the Yorkshire Moors, journalist Nick is caught in a blizzard and takes shelter in a quaint old hotel amid a bunch of disputatious strangers. Roads are impassable, lines of communications down...
When murder follows murder, paranoia stalks the halls, and Nick sets out to find the culprit.
Neil Ridley (RRP £12.99, Bloomsbury Publishing)
If, like the late Shirley Conran, you feel that life is too short to stuff a mushroom, but you’re planning a drinks party with nibbles, let this drinks writer and broadcaster talk you through perfect pairings.
Pork pie with Pinot Noir, spring rolls with G&T, prawn crackers with lager, salted pretzels with saké, haggis bonbons with Irn Bru. No cooking required.
Flora Shedden (RRP £26, Quadrille Publishing)
Ahead of stir-up Sunday, food writer and artisan baker Shedden pens a paean from her Highland kitchen to winter, mist, frost and clouds, when we can light the fires, light the candles, and prepare for the festivities ahead.
It’s time to make panettone, iced nutmeg cookies, wreaths, soups, stocks, mincemeat and marmalade, broths and brandy butter.
Diana Henry (RRP £20, Mitchell Beazley)
Imagine eating baklava in the Istanbul sunshine gazing at the Blue Mosque. Dining on grilled lamb with black olives at Chez Panisse in San Francisco. Sampling salmon cured under snow in Copenhagen. Nibbling hazelnuts and truffles in autumnal Piedmont.
Henry writes sensuously, evocatively and with deep understanding about life, food and travel – and still finds time to make toast.
Rob Temple (RRP £12.99, Allen & Unwin)
Have you seen the price of stamps? Could you just send eCards? Who thought secret Santa was a good idea? Why do fairy lights tie themselves in knots? Are inflatable Santas tasteful? How do you tell guests it’s time to leave? Where did you put the aspirins?
There is no need to let Christmas drive you crackers with this survivor’s guide from the creator of Very British Problems.
Kristiane Westray (RRP: £12.99, Bloomsbury Publishing)
A friend, a London bus driver and master of wine (no, he doesn’t drink and drive!) has recently turned his attention to whisky, so here’s the perfect gift for him.
A guide to tasting, drinking, mixing, collecting and storing fire water from around the world, this is ‘a love letter to modern whisky and the joy of it all’, pure, distilled pleasure – with caveats for would-be investors.
Rick Stein (RRP £28, BBC Books)
"I want to share all the things I love about Christmas with you," writes the convivial Stein, celebrity chef and restaurateur. And from negronis and nibbles to yule log, puddings, pickles and leftovers, his latest book is infused with the joys, while vegetarians won’t go hungry.
This is real food interspersed with anecdotes, cheer and light in dark times from a man who likes to party.
Ben Elton (RRP £25, Macmillan)
One minute Elton is a fresh-faced comic venting his spleen on Saturday Live, and the next, The Young Ones. Not any more! He’s 66, and what has he done? Well, he has 16 novels and a string of stellar TV credits to his name.
Here we find him as engaged and engaging as ever, rattling through his life story, still ‘unleashing’, in a memoir populated by comedy icons.
Jeremy Clarkson (RRP £22, Michael Joseph)
From Top Gear’s laddish petrol head to the British farmers’ champion and publican, Clarkson has always ploughed his own furrow. Now he’s on a mission to educate us about the brutal realities of British farming.
Brash and combative he may be but as this collection of his writings reminds us, he is also very fluent, funny and blissfully untrammelled by political correctness.
Margaret Atwood (RRP £30, Chatto & Windus)
Forty years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, 56 years after her debut novel, The Edible Woman, Canadian-born ‘Peggy’ Atwood is about to turn 86. Garlanded with honours, as a prolific, visionary writer, novelist, poet, feminist, environmentalist and inventor of a remote autopen, she is nothing short of phenomenal.
This memoir crackles with intelligence and puckish humour.
Anthony Montague Browne (RRP £29, Podkin Press)
A decorated World War II fighter pilot in Burma, the author was Winston Churchill’s last private secretary in peacetime, from 1952 until Churchill’s death in 1965. Republished and updated after 30 years, this is a seriously important memoir leavened with glorious, erudite wit.
An affectionate portrait of a lion in winter, statesman, orator, writer and very human being – history up close and personal.
Introduced by James Rebanks (RRP £15.99, Notting Hill Editions)
‘They put the Lake District at the heart of the English literary imagination,’ writes Rebanks in a thoughtful introduction to this anthology.
The Cumbrian farmer who shot to fame with A Shepherd’s Life reminds us that, far from being fops wandering lonely as clouds, the Lake Poets were radicals. One for thoughtful readers.
Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter (RRP £25, Batsford)
A trove of delights and surprises, this anthology explores the whole animal kingdom, from DH Lawrence’s Elephants Plodding to Thomas Gisborne’s The Worm and Emily Dickinson’s A Spider Sewed at Night.
Here, too, is TS Eliot’s Macavity, John Keats’s To Mrs Reynolds’s Cat, and Robert Herrick’s Upon his Spaniel Tracie (sob!).
Elle Hervin (RRP £30, Mitchell Beazley)
Journalist-turned-influencer Hervin transformed her 1930s semi in North Tyneside into her dream home, and in her first book she shows us how it can be done.
It’s not for minimalists, but anyone after the ‘modern vintage’ aesthetic with lashings of Farrow & Ball will find inspiration, ideas and advice.
Edward Brooke-Hitching (RRP £30, Simon & Schuster)
A fanfare, please, for Edinburgh’s Really Terrible Orchestra. A big hand for Niccolò Paganini, whose long fingers enabled him to play three octaves with one mitt.
From rat-bone flute to musical disasters, complete with playlists, this lavishly illustrated alternative history of music by former QI elf Brooke-Hitching is pitch perfect.
Marian Boswall (RRP £25, Quarto Publishing)
After sustainability, the next step is regenerative gardening – nurturing spaces for a positive impact.
Designer Boswall shares her experiences of creating gardens that are as good for nature as they are for our soul.
Jamie Butterworth (RRP £22, DK)
Gardening’s wunderkind Butterworth offers up Jamie Oliver-style easy recipes for plants in all spaces and seasons.
Sharing 64 plant combinations, he creates short cuts to beautiful borders that work.
Jason Ingram (RRP £26, Octopus)
Garden photography may seem easy with smartphones, but with a professional eye and techniques, you’ll achieve results that truly stand out.
Ingram is one of our finest photographers and he’ll inspire you to create as he helps to build your skills.
Sandra Lawrence (RRP £19.99, Frances Lincoln)
When weather drives us indoors, escaping into the imaginary worlds of gardens created by authors and poets is the perfect antidote to winter.
Lawrence shares the tales of 50 fictional gardens – from Alice in Wonderland and Mr McGregor to Jay Gatsby and Oscar Wilde.
Edited by Lia Leendertz (RRP £12.99, Gaia)
Everyone needs an eclectic miscellany, where plant facts, food tips and weather forecasts sit side by side to amuse and surprise. Leendertz recreated the almanac format and this, her tenth edition, has a woodland lore theme.
Warning: a five-minute browse can turn into hours.
[All reviews by Rose Shepherd, except gardening books by Lucy Hall. Hero image credit: Saga Magazine]
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