The best books to gift this Christmas: Booker authors and judges share their recommendations

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 this Christmas – books that’ll charm, dazzle, and stick with your loved ones long after the wrapping paper is gone. 

Sarah Jessica Parker recommends The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

I probably give The Bee Sting a lot as a gift.

The Splendid and the Vile, if you just want to touch on an interesting moment in history.

Sarah Jessica Parker was a judge for the Booker Prize 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published in 2024 and updated in 2025.