The Books To Gift This Christmas

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

Rebanks, the literary farmer and conservationist from the Lake District who shot to fame with ‘The Shepherd’s Life’ and ‘English Pastoral’, found himself ruminating about an elderly woman, Anna, he had met years earlier on a visit to Vega, a small island in a remote Norwegian archipelago. She was one of a dwindling breed of duck ‘farmers’, whose family had for generations cared for wild eider ducks, collecting the ducks’ precious down and selling it to make duvets. In the throes of some kind of mid-life crisis, when Rebanks felt himself raging at almost everything, he wrote to Anna and invited himself back to see her. She told him to come, bringing good boots, as long as he was prepared to work. In characteristically clear prose, he describes the season he spent there: the landscape, the light, the weather and the life, getting to know Anna and her history, the island community and, of course, the ducks. Above all, the emotionally intuitive Rebanks learns from Anna what he desperately needed to, about the healing power of forgiveness.

What I Ate in One Year [And Related Thoughts] by Stanley Tucci

There’s much more to this foodie memoir than just food, and a lot of it involves celebrity name dropping. Tucci is in Rome filming with Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini. Richard Madden pops in for steak and pasta. Colin Firth arrives for dinner an hour and a half late. There’s a charity fundraiser hosted by Hayley Atwell and a meal out with Richard Curtis and Emma Freud. On it goes. This could get tiresome but somehow doesn’t, partly because Tucci is such a celeb himself, it’s not surprising he hangs out with celebs. But it’s also because he maintains an air of semi-detached humility, divulging banal details about his domestic life: the man who comes to install black out blinds, his wife necking a bottle of water at airport security to avoid it being confiscated, school runs, pilates. There are the culinary vignettes too – the disasters and triumphs in the kitchen, meals out, and his abiding passion for food, all shot through with sadness recalling the people he has loved and lost. I liked it.

A Very Vintage Christmas: Photographs 1900-1980

They may all be black and white and taken decades ago in countries as far apart as the US and the Czech Republic, but these nostalgic photographs manage to evoke the enduring spirit and warmth of Christmas perfectly. It’s an album of absolutely magical moments. Here’s a little boy carrying a tree through the snow in Sweden from the 1950s; there’s a gigantic Santa float in a parade in New York from 1971. A butcher displays his turkeys in 1954; a family gathers round the tree to unwrap presents in Norway in 1953. There’s an outdoor sweets stall, children making biscuits, women in a factory preparing panettones and another putting the finishing touches on chocolate Santas. There are toys in a shop window and sales assistants madly gift wrapping. Fairy lights, snowy streets, tinsel, party hats, it’s all here. Styles may change but somehow the essence of Christmas never does.

Small Things Like These and Foster, both by Claire Keegan

It was a friend who first recommended Keegan, and these two wonderful novellas have just been reissued in beautiful hardback editions. ‘Small Things’ (coincidentally just out as a movie starring Cillian Murphy), set in the 1980s just before Christmas, is about a coal merchant, married with two daughters and living in a small Irish town. He has his own traumatic past, which makes it all the harder for him to decide whether to act or keep quiet when he uncovers a dirty secret in the local mother and baby institution run by nuns. Keegan was inspired by the true, shameful story of the Magdalen laundries, where unmarried pregnant women and young mothers were forced into labour for decades until the 1990s. ‘Foster’, meanwhile, is a luminous story of secrets and revelations, about a young girl who goes to stay with her aunt and uncle on their farm in County Wexford as her own mother is about to have yet another baby. At first she is mystified by the overwhelming affection shown to her, but soon begins to blossom. If you haven’t read Claire Keegan, you have been missing out.

Shattered: A Memoir by Hanif Kureishi

Boxing Day 2023. Rome. Kureishi was watching football on his iPad when he felt dizzy and passed out. How ironic that this catastrophic fall at his Italian girlfriend Isabella's home, which resulted in instant tetraplegia – he broke his neck – should lead to perhaps the most interesting work he has written and certainly one of the best books of the year. Kureishi is so curious, so challenging and so demanding of himself and others. How can he survive this? How can he write when his limbs don’t work, when he can’t even hold a pen? The answer is that he must write to survive and his son Carlo becomes his scribe. All this he describes with compelling insight. “We are in constant development, never the same as yesterday. All the time we're changing, there is no going back. My world has taken a zig where previously it zagged; it has been smashed, remade and altered, and there is nothing I can do about it. But I will not go under; I will make something of this.” And, boy, he has.

Small Things Like These and Foster, both by Claire Keegan

It was a friend who first recommended Keegan, and these two wonderful novellas have just been reissued in beautiful hardback editions. ‘Small Things’ (coincidentally just out as a movie starring Cillian Murphy), set in the 1980s just before Christmas, is about a coal merchant, married with two daughters and living in a small Irish town. He has his own traumatic past, which makes it all the harder for him to decide whether to act or keep quiet when he uncovers a dirty secret in the local mother and baby institution run by nuns. Keegan was inspired by the true, shameful story of the Magdalen laundries, where unmarried pregnant women and young mothers were forced into labour for decades until the 1990s. ‘Foster’, meanwhile, is a luminous story of secrets and revelations, about a young girl who goes to stay with her aunt and uncle on their farm in County Wexford as her own mother is about to have yet another baby. At first she is mystified by the overwhelming affection shown to her, but soon begins to blossom. If you haven’t read Claire Keegan, you have been missing out.

Ottolenghi Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi

What does comfort food look like to you? Is it scrambled eggs on toast or fish pie or a hearty chicken soup or something else? Regardless, you probably don’t need yet another cookbook to tell you how to make any of them, which is why this latest volume from Yotam Ottolenghi is so welcome. It is other people’s comfort food recipes that are on offer here. Not just Yotam’s either, but his long-time collaborators Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller and Tara Wigley all chip in with their family favourites and go-to staples. This makes for a fascinatingly diverse compilation of recipes from different parts of the world. Would you think of Mung bean and kimchi falafel or Butter-braised kohlrabi with olive chimichurri as comfort food? Not necessarily. On the other hand, with Cheesy bread soup with Savoy cabbage or Malty figgy pudding, you most definitely would. And that’s surely the point: one person’s beloved home recipe will inspire another’s gastronomic challenge.

A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers For All Seasons by Sarah Raven

It seems almost counter-intuitive, but despite her enormous garden, Sarah Raven loves growing flowers in pots and reckons she has almost four hundred plant-filled containers of one size or another. Having spent almost three decades running her business and cultivating her amazing garden at Perch Hill in Sussex, Raven now knows what works and what doesn’t when it comes to pot planting. This book is the fruit of that knowledge. More is more is her first rule. Then, how to choose your colour palette, how to choose which types of flower go best with which others, and where to place your pots, followed by – and this is the meat of the book – a month-by-month guide to planting. Follow what she says and you too will be able to create combinations of blooms that will keep flowering all year long. And if that all sounds a bit too “how-to”, the text is brought alive by Jonathan Buckley’s sumptuous colour photography, which is liberally sprinkled on every single page.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

If you loved ‘The Line of Beauty’, you won't be disappointed by Hollinghurst’s latest, acutely-observed portrait of modern England, seen through the eyes of one man looking back over half a century. Dave Win is a well-known theatrical actor who recalls key moments in his life, from his difficult adolescence at a boys’ boarding school on the Berkshire Downs, through to the pandemic. Win is half-Burmese and never met his Burmese father, but has been raised by a single mother. He is attracted to other boys at school at a time when homosexuality has only just been decriminalised, and he’s on a bursary, thanks to a generous patron whose own obnoxious son bullies him. Later, as Win becomes immersed in the thriving 1970s London arts scene, he starts to understand the tensions at play in being gay and mixed-race in a rapidly changing society, while his depiction of his relationship with the mother who brought him up on her own is filled with tenderness.

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Roshoi; translated by Caroline Waight

A bittersweet short story set in Norway in the lead up to Christmas. Young Ronja lives with her father and older sister Melissa. Charming and kind as he is, her father can’t hold down a job and always ends up spending his earnings at the local boozer, leaving the girls to fend for themselves, often hungry and cold. When he packs up his latest job, selling spruce trees for Christmas, the teenage Melissa takes his place, putting in the hours before and after school. Soon the fridge is filled once more with food, even if their father has passed out on the floor. Roshoi, who has published several short story collections, evokes the loneliness and heartache of two children who love a father despite his alcoholism, and how they can never give up hope that things will get better. In their small, not-so-perfect world, there are after all kind neighbours and friends, but the spectre of what might happen next is never far away. Glittering snow, frosty sunshine and freezing winds pervade the pages.