The best books to give as presents this Christmas, personally recommended

When it comes to gifts, you can’t go wrong with a good book. Here you’ll find standout titles across genres and styles, thoughtfully selected by The Independent’s culture staff to suit readers of every predilection

From us to you: The Independent team pick their favourite books to gift this year (The Independent/Adobe)

Finding the right gift can be tricky. Clothes are hard. Experiences are harder. And shipping times are long. But when all else fails, you can always count on a trusty book to do the trick. Obviously finding the right one is a challenge, and reading tastes vary from person to person, but succeed and you’ll be forever remembered (and thanked) as the gift-giver who introduced someone to their new favourite, world-altering book.

To help you out, The Independent’s culture team have revealed what books they will be gifting this year – from recent releases by recognisable names like Zadie Smith and Kathy Burke to timeless, transportive fiction and memoirs that’ll have you cackling one minute and crying the next.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

The book that I’d gift is also the one I’d request on my death bed. Patricia Lockwood’s recollection of growing up in the Midwest, the daughter of a guitar-shredding, gun-toting, tighty-wightie-wearing priest, is the most fun I’ve had reading as an adult. Which isn’t to say it’s all laughs. Priestdaddy is shot through with revelations and poignancy as its author chronicles her childhood attending anti-abortion rallies and moving back in with her parents to care for her ailing husband. Lockwood’s writing is pure delight: her dad is a “loose, lazy pile of carnality”, a man who despises cats and “believes them to be Democrats”. It’s writing that rewards repeat reading – jokes within jokes, meaning within meaning. It’s a Russian doll of a book, and a gift worth giving a hundred times over. Annabel Nugent

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga

Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel asks to what extent we can help others before we become a threat to ourselves. The Albanian-American author sees New York through the eyes of an unnamed refugee translator who risks her marriage, her job, and ultimately her life as she becomes embroiled in the problems of people she barely knows. Misinterpretation isn’t a thriller, but it’s paced like one, making it perfect for someone who hates murder mysteries but has a somewhat short attention span. Still, don’t be fooled by its direct, matter-of-fact prose. This novel is a constellation of communication breakdowns that leaves you with a lingering awareness of how our own experiences can cloud our perception of reality. Lydia Spencer-Elliott

A rollicking ride through the Midwest, says Annabel Nugent (Penguin)

The Wager by David Grann

If you’re buying for someone who, like me, enjoys a rip-roaring tale on the high seas, look no further than David Grann’s The Wager. It may be non-fiction, but it reads like a thriller as Grann unravels the 18th-century shipwreck that left a British naval crew stranded at the edge of the world – and the mutiny, madness and moral murkiness that followed. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Grann is cinematic in his writing, so much so that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have already nabbed the rights for a film adaptation, as they did also with his 2017 book about the Osage murders, Killers of the Flower Moon. Read it (and gift it) now before this story sets sail for the big screen. Tom Murray

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Is it a YA book or a novel for grown adults? Within a couple of chapters, you won’t really care. Set in modern Tokyo, Lonely Castle tells the story of 13-year-old Kokoro (a word that means “heart” in Japanese), who is being bullied at school – so much so that she stops going altogether and lounges around at home instead. It’s on one of these strange, liminal days that she discovers the mirror in her room is shining peculiarly. Upon inspecting it, she is transported to a castle, where she meets other kids her age and the Wolf Queen in charge. This Queen gives the kids one year to find a key hidden within the castle. Though the mission itself is thrilling, especially since they’re not allowed to stay overnight or they’ll get eaten by the Wolf Queen, this story is about the pain and beauty of teenagehood and trying to make friends when you don’t fit in. I’ve gifted this to three different people, all of varying tastes and sensibilities, and none of them have come away from this lovely novel without shedding a tear. Hannah Ewens

Unpretentious and evocative writing that lands you smack bang in the Seventies, writes Ellie Harrison (Gallery)

A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke

Read this memoir with Burke’s smoky London accent in mind and you will find yourself chuckling, weeping, and somehow feeling nostalgic for someone else’s life. I may be a Nineties kid, but this raw and compassionate story lands me right back in the Seventies, amid the author’s early and teenage years living on an Islington estate. Burke’s writing is unpretentious and evocative, whether she’s describing the “crunch” of the crisps she snaffled on her way home from school, or the hurt she felt the first time she was called ugly. When Burke was just two, her mother died of stomach cancer, and this book charts all the kind and eccentric people who drifted in and out of her life as maternal surrogates of sorts. It also documents her first strides into acting, which began with five-minute shows in the school playground. It was surely as much of a thrill to be part of her audience back then as it is now. Ellie Harrison

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

It’s not often that I find myself getting genuinely excited for the release of an essay collection, but I make an exception for Zadie Smith. Much as I love her novels, her criticism and non-fiction have always had the edge for me. I always come away from reading her essays feeling as though she’s managed to articulate something I’ve been mulling in the back of my mind for a while. Simultaneously, she manages to turn all my assumptions upside down – and isn’t that exactly what reading should do? Dead and Alive is a real dazzler, jumping effortlessly between subjects as disparate as the Cate Blanchett movie Tar, the work of Hilary Mantel, Stormzy’s Glastonbury set, and Smith’s beloved hometown of Kilburn. Buy it for that friend who’s intimidatingly culturally literate, and await their nod of approval. Katie Rosseinsky

A real dazzler of essays about everything from Hilary Mantel to Kilburn, writes Katie Rosseinsky (Penguin)

The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco by Julie Salamon

In 1987, film studios rushed to greenlight an adaptation of the year’s hottest book, Tom Wolfe’s bestselling The Bonfire of the Vanities. Brian De Palma was hired to direct, Tom Hanks was cast – and the outlook was so positive, writer Julie Salamon was given full access to document the making of what was sure to be an acclaimed Oscar-winner. How wrong they were. When production began in 1990, it became clear that what they actually had on their hands was a flop of the highest order, and, rather than shy away from the realisation, De Palma told Salamon to document everything as she saw it. The result is a fascinating insight into how even Hollywood can make mistakes. Armed with tales of the egocentric antics of Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith, or the millions of dollars squandered on what would amount to just two seconds of screentime, you’ll be entertaining your family around the Christmas table with anecdotes from this rich and dishy book. Jacob Stolworthy

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Everyone should have a comfort read, that novel they turn to again and again throughout their lifetime. The characters feel like friends, and the narrative, like an old pair of slippers perfectly moulded to your feet as you retread a familiar plot. Dodie Smith’s coming-of-age classic has been my go-to book ever since I read it as a teenager. Told from the perspective of 17-year-old Cassandra, it charts the story of her bohemian family as they live out their days in a romantic but dilapidated castle, an existence marked by a kind of refined poverty. The magic lies in Cassandra’s charming narration, and the way that Smith artfully captures the spirit of a girl who’s still a child, teetering on the edge of adulthood. Helen Coffey

A story about the pain and beauty of teenagehood and trying to make friends when you don’t fit in, writes Hannah Ewens (Penguin)

Stay True by Hua Hsu

What an exquisite book Stay True is. A vivid meditation on friendship, guilt and memory, Hua Hsu’s 193-page Pulitzer winner was given to me by a mate a couple of years ago, and I devoured it in one sitting. As you would expect from a New Yorker staff writer, Stay True is filled with pop-cultural artefacts, its mentions of fanzines, fax machines and The Fugees transporting you to Nineties California. At heart, the book is about Hsu slowly coming to terms with the senseless murder of his Berkeley classmate, Ken, in a carjacking. But it’s also the tale of a music-loving, second-generation Taiwanese American navigating young adulthood. While undeniably sad in parts – it certainly slayed me – there’s so much beauty in Hsu’s turn of phrase. It’s subsequently become my go-to gift. Patrick Smith

Just Kids (Illustrated Edition) by Patti Smith

Patti Smith released her latest memoir, Bread of Angels – hailed by her publishers as her “most intimate and visionary work” – just last month. But those who have yet to read any of the punk poet laureate’s writing must start with her first autobiography. Just Kids is an intensely moving account of Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, chronicling their first fateful encounter in July 1967 – the summer that John Coltrane died and Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire – to Mapplethorpe’s death in March 1989. Smith, who left home in New Jersey seeking to become part of a lineage of poets (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet, the Beats), recounts everything with a magpie’s eye for sparkling detail. Perhaps most intoxicating is the community of influential artists she captures in her writing – the famous and the infamous – alongside the city’s drag queens, art collectors, models and misfits. Roisin O’Connor

This very funny state-of-the-nation satire cuts even deeper now than it did when it was published in 2010, writes Louis Chilton (Old Street)

Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl by Alison Rose

The writer Alison Rose, a sort of New York It-girl for people who like Whit Stillman movies and vintage photographs of socialites, died in September at the age of 81, and her death went unreported for a month. This was apt – Rose was flighty, scatterbrained, too enigmatic to ever become a writerly touchstone in the manner of Eve Babitz or Joan Didion. Of course it took a while for people to write her obits. Before her death, she wrote witty little morsels about art galleries, fashion and metropolitan sexcapades for The New Yorker – like Carrie Bradshaw if she was literary. And her opus is her 2004 memoir Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, which rambles elegantly about desire, love affairs, magazines and clothing. She recounts a series of doomed romances with married writers, all the while sharpening her own pen and learning how to be a person. She’s around 40 at this point, a real grown-up – albeit with the naive curiosity of a teenager. Rose was probably unbearable in person. You will still, all the same, wish you had her life. Adam White

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” So begins The Ask, a brilliant, potently funny novel by American writer Sam Lipsyte. Following a man tasked with soliciting donations from wealthy patrons for a New York university, The Ask is some of the brightest belletristic fiction I’ve read in years. There are layers and complexities to its cynical state-of-the-nation satire, which probably cuts even keener now than in 2010, at first publication. Lipsyte’s writing, meanwhile, is a thing of beauty: elegant and precise, without ever sacrificing a punchline. Fans of Joseph Heller will love it – I certainly did. Louis Chilton