Stocking fillers from the Booker Library: a book for every type of reader
Looking for the perfect gift this festive season? This selection of Booker-nominated books will add a touch of magic to every reader’s Christmas
The best books to gift this Christmas: Booker authors and judges share their recommendations
This festive season, members of the Booker Prizes family reveal the books they are giving in 2024, and explain why they’ll leave a lasting mark well beyond the holidays
As book lovers, we’re all in on the secret: there is no gift quite like a perfectly chosen book. Whether it’s a page-turning novel, a moving collection of poems, or a thought-provoking work of non-fiction – the right book has the power to shift how we see the world.
And now that the season of gift-giving is upon us, we find ourselves scribbling lists and searching for that just-right present for our nearest and dearest. But even the most dedicated reader could use a spark of inspiration, now and then. So, who better to ask than the people who know books best? From Booker Prize shortlistees and International Booker Prize judges to this year’s judges, we’ve asked our friends to tell us which books they’ll be gifting in 2024 – books that’ll charm, dazzle, and stick with your loved ones long after the wrapping paper is gone.
Samantha Harvey recommends Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
This is an all-time favourite of mine, and I’m choosing it now because I recently dipped into it, as I sometimes do when I’m trying to feel my way back into writing. It’s a good book to gift – short and jewel-like in its prose, which has the simple clean clarity of poetry at its best. You read the opening lines – ‘The train came out of the tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky’ – and you are there, in the novel, in the midst of winter, in a dreamscape, silent and strange.
Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize 2024 for Orbital
Georgi Gospodinov recommends The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson
For 17 years now I have a little ‘Gift a Book for Christmas’ campaign. Because Christmases are made of books. I remember The Little Match Girl and the secret tear through which I read it. I would gift it again and again because it is a test of empathy. And that seems crucial to me. Also Laura Gilpin, a remarkable poet with only a single book in her lifetime, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. And something more recent: Benjamin Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World. It reveals how no discovery is innocent and always affects a person’s body as well – for better or worse, most often for both.
Georgi Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize 2023 for Time Shelter
Angela Rodel recommends Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
While the tale of a writer’s excruciating medical crisis does not sound like a cheerful holiday gift idea, I nevertheless think Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is the perfect book to curl up with by the yule fire. Just as the winter holidays are one of the only times in our breakneck lives to slow down and reflect on the past and future, the narrator’s sudden illness and prolonged hospitalisation offers what he calls ‘the relief of being a patient’: the chance to stop and pay careful attention to what really gives our lives meaning, in his case art and love. I was just finishing my translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s new book, Death and the Gardener, an exquisite contemplation of his father’s illness and death, as I began reading Small Rain, and I felt as if I could still hear a faint resonance of Garth’s years in Bulgaria in this story. Given both works’ poetic explorations of mortality and love, I look forward to these two books being in conversation with each other in 2025.
Angel Rodel won the International Booker Prize 2023 for her translation of Time Shelter
Rita Bullwinkel recommends Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
I have gifted Little Labors by Rivka Galchen more than any other book in my life. Little Labors is a book about what it feels like to become a parent, but it’s also a book about medieval Japanese court life, telepathy, organising your clothing drawers, failed writing retreats, movie posters, inheritance, low-fat yogurt, and fashion. It defies genre in all ways. It is generous, open-hearted, and elegant. I can think of no holiday, or occasion, on which it would not be an appropriate and cherished gift. The New Directions tangerine-coloured cloth hardback edition is especially pretty, if pretty books are, for you, a weakness.
Rita Bullwinkel was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 for Headshot
Justine Jordan recommends Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
In the first half of the year, I read very few books that weren’t on the judging pile, but I had to make an exception for Richard Flanagan’s extraordinary memoir Question 7 – my fellow judges were raving about it too. It’s gone on to win the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and some of the material within will be familiar to Booker fans from his 2014 winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is about his father’s time in a Japanese POW camp: had it not been for Hiroshima, he would have perished and Flanagan would never have been born. But it’s such an unusual and striking book that it will feel like a discovery to every reader: yes, it’s a fascinating account of his Tasmanian upbringing and ancestry, burning with anticolonial anger, but it also brings in literary criticism and science writing to build into a study of causality – almost a theory of everything. Did H. G. Wells dream the nuclear bomb into existence? The force and grand ambition of this book restates the power of the imagination, and is guaranteed to change the way you think.
Justine Jordan was a judge of the Booker Prize 2024
Chetna Maroo recommends Here by Richard McGuire
It‘s a graphic novel with very little text and it was recommended to me by a friend who said simply that it was a series of images of one room in a house over time, all from a single vantage point. I’d also heard there was something new in what it did with time, space and the reader’s mind. Encountering the book 10 years after it was published, knowing no more than this, I was blown away by it.
Chetna Maroo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 for Western Lane
Sarah Bernstein recommends The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
A friend of mine recently recommended Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, and I’d like to pass on that recommendation. Choi’s is a beautiful and luminous collection of poems about the ruin of the present, which sits in the ruins of the past, about our own culpability, and about how we might nevertheless find life, find survival, in community with other people.
Sarah Bernstein was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 for Study for Obedience
Anton Hur recommends The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
Sometimes, you come across a novel so perfect that you are confident that whomever you gift it to will love it. The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr, published in Canada in 2022, took a couple of years to reach the reading pile for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award where I immediately fell in love with it, from the first paragraph onwards. The story of a Pullman train porter in 1929, this short, taut, and beautifully written novel weaves Black history, queer narrative, and the kind of magic only possible in fiction into a reading experience that glided along rails.
Anton Hur is a judge for the International Booker Prize 2025
Max Porter recommends Orbital by Samantha Harvey
This year I’ll be buying Orbital for everyone. Sam is a dear friend of mine and from the second I read the opening sentences of the manuscript she kindly shared with me several years ago, I have wanted it to be celebrated, translated, discussed and taken to heart. I hoped it would win prizes and find many readers around the world. I’d love there to be a copy in every home. It’s a miraculous work of art for all of us, for all time.
Max Porter is Chair of judges for the International Booker Prize 2025
Charlotte Wood recommends The First Friend by Malcolm Knox
Totalitarian absurdity gets a savage satirical workout in this new Australian novel about despots and ‘friendship’ by the always-interesting Malcolm Knox. Combining a sincerely beautiful love story with hilarious contemporary Oz vernacular and brutal 1930s Soviet politics, it’s the perfect lens for watching the Trump-Musk bromance implode. Very dark, very brilliant.
Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 for Stone Yard Devotional
Sara Collins recommends Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
I’ve written elsewhere about the fact that I am gifting You Are Here by David Nicholls and Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, but after wrapping several copies of those for some beloved friends, I started Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst as my first post- Booker read. It’s a glimmering delight of a novel, languid, sensual, unfurling in page after page of prose so exquisite you feel you’re reading an unparalleled writer at the top of his game. That’s all my last-minute gifts sorted.
Sara Collins was a judge for the Booker Prize 2024
Yiyun Li recommends The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated by Peter Filkins
I would like to recommend The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, which was recently translated into English by Peter Filkins. It’s a collection of Canetti’s notes between 1937 and 1994, in which the Nobel laureate mused about life, history, philosophy, arguing for and against death. I picked up a copy of the book when I was in London for the final Booker judging meeting, and have been reading it slowly in the past few weeks. Canneti’s unaverted and unwavering scrutiny of death, instead of looking away for false consolation, is singularly courageous and inspiring. I find the book one of the most life-affirming books ever written.
Yiyun Li was a judge for the Booker Prize 2024
