Gift Guide for Fiction Fanatics

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This Christmas, our Booksellers have been busy curating gifting guides to suit all. Whether you're buying for that cousin who lives to travel, a Cricket obsessed uncle; looking for the perfect gift for little ones, big ones or difficult ones, we've got you covered.

Presenting our Gift Guide for Fiction Fanatics:

My Brilliant Friend: The Four Volumes

Elena Ferrante (author), Ann Goldstein (translator)

When Elena Ferrante set out to write the story of Elena and Lila, she conceived it as one single work of fiction, one expansive novel that would capture the reality and ambivalence of female friendship, motherhood, marriage, class and adolescence. 2025 marks 10 years since publication of the quartet was completed. To celebrate this anniversary, as well as honour and acknowledge the author’s original conception, we are releasing the four novels in one volume. Described by the New Yorker’s James Wood as “large, captivating, amiably peopled... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” the Neapolitan Quartet tells a poignant, universal story about friendship and belonging.

Advent

Gunnar Gunnarsson (author), Philip Roughton (translator)

Every winter, in the days leading up to Christmas, Benedikt walks into the snowy mountains of Iceland to rescue sheep lost in the blizzards. With his dog and his ram by his side, traversing wild snowstorms and crystalline nights, fuelled by endless cups of hot coffee, Benedikt dedicates himself to helping other living beings in need. It is midwinter in the harshest of landscapes, but this is a place of deep belonging and peace – brutal and remorseless yet irresistible and indispensable. It is also a time of peace, filled with the anticipation of that special time of year – the days before Christmas: Advent. This enchanting Icelandic classic of one man’s selfless quest at Christmas time has been newly translated into English for the first time in 90 years.

The New York Trilogy

Paul Auster (author), Paul Karasik (illustrator), Lorenzo Mattotti (illustrator), David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)

From its iconic opening, The New York Trilogy famously blurred the lines between postmodern literature and noir fiction. Now, for the first time, all three books have been adapted for this landmark graphic novel, each by a different artist, and all overseen by Paul Auster before his death. In David Mazzuchelli's take on City of Glass, a writer of detective fiction is drawn into a real-life case far stranger than anything he has ever written; in Lorenzo Mattotti's Ghosts, a private eye is hired to stalk a man only to discover a case so puzzling he descends into madness; and in series Director Paul Karasik's The Locked Room, another author hopes to cure his writer's block by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. As each artist channels the cross-genre thrills of their source material, with its joyous mix of highbrow and lowbrow, the result is a groundbreaking new visual take on a modern classic.

The Country Girls

Edna O'Brien

The groundbreaking debut novel that set the world alight, from the beloved great Edna O'Brien. Caithleen is a romantic: she dreams of finding a handsome man who will sweep her away and look after her. Her friend Baba thinks this makes her a right-looking eejit. What she wants is money and glamour. Life. As much of it as she can get. But neither love nor excitement seem possible in their small village, or their convent school. And when they finally make it to Dublin, they find that home isn't as easy to escape as they thought.

The Bovadium Fragments

J. R. R. Tolkien (author), Christopher Tolkien (editor)

World first publication of a previously unknown short satirical fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien, and accompanied by illustrations from the author together with an essay, The Origin of Bovadium, by Richard Ovenden OBE. Readers can enjoy at last this tale of an imagined Oxford viewed through the lens of future (and not wholly reliable) academic study. Richard Ovenden's accompanying essay paints a vivid portrait of Oxford during that time. He also provides rich background to the casus belli which led to the furore that Tolkien witnessed first-hand, as the embers of debate between town planners and the university colleges were fanned into flame. Playful, erudite, and ultimately tragically moving, The Bovadium Fragments is like nothing else that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, and its themes remain both provocative and timely. Within its lines may be found a concern for the fragility of our natural world, a love of which that was shared by both father and son. As Christopher Tolkien’s final presentation of his father’s work, it is therefore perhaps fitting that The Bovadium Fragments should be their coda.

Wicked

Gregory Maguire

Fall under the Wicked spell with this beautiful new 30th anniversary hardback. Long before Dorothy follows the yellow brick road and triumphs over the Wicked Witch of the West, a little girl with emerald-green skin is born in the land of Oz. Elphaba grows up to be smart and prickly, a lonely outsider with an extraordinary talent for magic. Arriving at university, she dares to believe she might finally fit in. But Oz isn't the haven she'd dreamed of. Some of its citizens are in grave danger, and Elphaba is determined to protect them from the Wizard's power. And when the world declares her a wicked witch, Elphaba takes matters into her own hands...

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman (author), Ros Schwartz (translator)

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men. With a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Water Cure.

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

This exclusive 10th anniversary edition features artwork by acclaimed artists RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, as well as a Q&A with the author. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor. JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world. Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm. And withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself. By midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

The Life of Violet

Virginia Woolf (author), Urmila Seshagiri (editor)

Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first time. A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.

Antarctica

Claire Keegan

A stunning new hardback edition of Claire Keegan's debut story collection. A secret one-night tryst in the city. A sister's revenge. A love-struck doctor. A missing girl. In Antarctica, an astonishing sequence of stories, one of our most gifted writers illuminates human longing and fallibility in all its variety.