The last-minute list

David Sexton rounds up some properly good books that will make a worthwhile gift
From book to screen: Angelina Jolie’s new film is based on Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
David Sexton19 December 2014

Here it is at last, the Christmas crunch: you’re in the bookshop, trying to remember what all those rave reviews and heartfelt recommendations were. What would actually make a worthwhile gift? Here’s a final reminder of some properly good books.

This year’s Man Booker winner was The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Chatto, £16.99): Japanese prisoner-of-war horror, powerful if messy. The Johnson Non-Fiction Prize went to H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Cape, £16.99), an intense, wayward memoir of overcoming grief through training a goshawk.

History: Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts (Allen Lane, £30) is an immense (nearly 1,000 pages) but compulsively readable biography, making the case for Bonaparte’s achievements as never before. For patriots, The English and Their History by Robert Tombs (Allen Lane, £35) is a similarly scaled, equally entertaining account of who we are by a stylish, incisive writer. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Harvill Secker, £25) is even more sweeping and challenging.

Biography: The Iceberg by Marion Coutts (Atlantic, £14.99) is a harrowing but brilliantly written memoir of the life and death of her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock. Angelina Jolie’s new film about the courage of Louis Zamperini may be disappointing but the book it is based on, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, (4th Estate, £8.99), is not.

Fiction: the most ambitious and addictive project under way is My Struggle by the Norwegian autobiographer Karl Ove Knausgaard, this year reaching Vol 3: Boyhood Island (Vintage, £8.99).

Comedy: Spoiled Brats by New Yorker contributor Simon Rich (Serpent’s Tail, £8.99) is a hilarious collection of inventive, spoofy short stories.

Music: there have been two great reads — Jan Swafford’s vast and engaging biography, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Faber, £30), and Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber, £20) by Ian Bostridge, a reflective companion to Winterreise.

Any Londoner would find much food for thought in the year’s best reprint, Nairn’s London by Ian Nairn (Penguin, £9.99), unrevised, out of date, but nonetheless fascinating.

Among reference books, How to Speak Money by John Lanchester (Faber, £17.99) is sardonically informative about what those mystifying terms really mean, while always worth remembering is Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book (Mitchell Beazley, £11.99): no other text translates so consistently into enhanced pleasure.

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