Let’s recommend some Christmas reads!
If anyone is looking for a festive themed read to pick up over the holidays, here are a few recommendations to hopefully point you in the right direction. As always, I encourage you to share your own recommendations in return!
Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay
This is a series of extracts from the real-life diaries that Kay kept during his time as a junior doctor, taken specifically from the seven festive seasons he spent working on hospital wards. I found it more focussed and affecting than his similar (though not Christmas centred) offering, This is Going to Hurt, and I thought his signature sarcastic humour felt less forced this time around, adding some much needed light to balance out the darkness. Indeed, it’s the kind of book that is just as likely to make you laugh as it is to make you cry. If there was ever a year when we all need to remember the hardships endured by selfless NHS staff, particularly throughout the holidays, it’s this one.
The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy
For much of her run as the UK’s poet laureate, Duffy released an annual Christmas poem to mark the festive season. Each one was released as a compact little hardback, with accompanying illustrations by a different artist. This particular offering is inspired by the real-life events of Christmas Day, 1914, when opposing sides of the First World War downed their weapons and met on No Man’s Land to play football, exchange gifts, and sing songs. Its messages of coming together to overcome adversity, and finding light amidst the darkest of times resonate particularly strongly this year.
Miss Marley by Vanessa Lafaye
Told from the perspective of Jacob Marley’s sister, Clara, this serves as a prequel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, exploring the events that led to her brother’s tragic demise. The best kind of tie-in novel, Miss Marley successfully toes the line between reverence for the original, and the crafting of a story that feels new and worthwhile. Dickens’ existing characters are handled well, while the new ones are inserted seamlessly without contradicting any of the established lore. It manages to build on the core themes of A Christmas Carol, and is a suitably poignant read about class, loyalty, and fate versus freewill.
A Literary Christmas by The British Library
Bringing together short stories, poems, and novel extracts all centred around Christmas, this is an ideal means of trying various authors’ styles and seeing which ones you gel with. It’s mainly classic works but there are a few contemporary writers featured as well. The highlight for me was Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson, a poem about a man aboard a fishing vessel whose thoughts turn to home during a storm on Christmas morning. Other highlights included: A Christmas Carol by Christina Rossetti; A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore; and extracts from Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Charming, well structured, and beautifully presented, it’s great to dip in and out of throughout the holiday.
There we have it! I know Christmas will likely look different for most of us this year, but I hope you all have a safe, lovely time nonetheless. What festive reads would you recommend?
As the title suggests, this is primarily a look at the concept of loyalty in its various forms. With each of the 4 main characters keeping a secret on behalf of someone else, de Vigan explores the moral complexities inherent to balancing trust with honesty. The undercurrent of tension and claustrophobia that builds throughout had me enthralled, and I loved its subtle commentary on sexism and the nuance of what constitutes abuse.
Deliberately repellent and utterly compelling in equal measure, this all-too-plausible dystopian looks at what might happen if animal meat was toxic to humans, and cannibalism became the norm. Bazterrica is unflinching in her portrayal of society’s degradation, but there’s so much depth to revel in, with commentary on the role of language, genetic modification, hunting for sport, human trafficking, and class disparity all woven in seamlessly.
At once a searing social commentary and a gripping page-turner, Liar looks at the ease with which our words can take on a life of their own, when a 17-year-old girl falsely accuses a minor celebrity of assault. The novel’s real strengths are its fantastically well-realised characters, who are painfully flawed, complex and believable, and Gundar-Goshen’s stunning prose, which can make even the smallest moments shine.
Loosely tied around our narrator’s struggle to come to terms with the death of her baby sister, this experimental little gem is part novel, part memoir, part prose poetry collection. Beautifully written, I found it as linguistically stimulating as I did emotionally impactful, and loved witnessing its constant push and pull between fact and fiction.
Inspired by the author’s real life, this graphic novel explores the difficulty of navigating grief, and the importance of finding hope, when two women’s journey to have a child culminates in tragedy. Accompanied by Maurel’s dreamlike artwork, it’s a moving story handled with due sensitivity, and the normalised queer representation was a very welcome touch.
The concept and prose may seem straightforward in this exploration of society versus the individual, but it’s shrewdly observant and quietly impactful. Ultimately, Murata asks us to consider the extent to which we should sacrifice the things that make us happy, if simply for the sake of fitting in and avoiding scrutiny. With moments of poignancy and understated humour, she also touches on ingrained misogyny and class divides, all carried by her heroine’s charmingly unique world view.
The gripping pace of a thriller can often come at the expense of character depth. Not so in Snare. This excellent example of noir fiction takes us into Iceland’s underbelly, as a woman turns to drug smuggling to fund a custody battle over her young son. Page-turning tension, a tangled web of morally ambiguous characters, engaging subplots, and emotional complexity elevated what could have been a nondescript crime flick into something decidedly more memorable.
There’s an unexpected tenderness to this speculative dystopian tale, in which those who remain unmarried and childless over the age of 50 must enter a Unit. Here, they live a life of luxury but must participate in clinical trials and forced organ donation. Though easy to fly through, the book has interesting things to say about how society defines value in life, as well as class snobbery and the role of women. Chiefly, it ruminates on why certain types of love are given credence over others.
An elderly grandmother finally divulges the details of a tragic love affair that played out during Occupation in this heartbreaking yet hopeful graphic novel. Set largely in one apartment block in 1942, we glimpse a microcosm of society at the time, with the author brilliantly capturing the moral dilemmas people were forced to navigate day-to-day under Nazi rule; the divide between those who acted in aid of the greater good and those who served only themselves.
Employing a touch of the supernatural, Tokyo Ueno Station explores the very real problem of poverty, highlighting wilful ignorance towards widespread homelessness in modern-day Japan. The tone throughout is one of nostalgia and melancholy, as our deceased narrator looks back on a life of crippling poverty, missed opportunities, and lost love. The book offers heartfelt insight into the cost endured by those pushed to the fringes of society as a direct result of their socioeconomic standing.
Described as a Victorian chiller, The Corset follows two young women in very different circumstances. Ruth is a teenage seamstress awaiting trial for murder. Dorothea is a wealthy socialite, whose fascination with phrenology leads her to Oakgate Prison, where she hopes to uncover the truth behind Ruth’s case. An air of mystery and threat bubbles throughout, with the book exploring notions of female autonomy, the horror of poverty, and the psychological impact of trauma. Flirtations with the possibility of something supernatural are handled incredibly well, elevating this gothic gem to the heights of subtle literary horror.
Written in sumptuous, evocative prose, A Spell of Winter is a strangely beguiling tale that explores forbidden love, the burden of secrets, and the struggle to escape the cloying inheritance of family. Set largely in the build up to WWI, we have many hallmarks of the gothic genre, including an imposing manor home, a family cutting themselves off from the outside world, and dangerous secrets that threaten to tear them all apart. Tense and quietly eerie without ever boiling over, I was utterly enthralled.
Clara, a young woman with a rare brittle bone condition and a passion for botany, is invited to establish a glasshouse at Shadowbrook, an infamous country home. Upon arrival, she finds an owner conspicuous by absence, and residents terrified of a supposed haunting. Clara soon sets her practical mind to solving the crumbling manor’s mysteries. In many ways, this is a book of opposites; of truth versus lies, logic versus faith, and reality versus the supernatural, as we follow the unravelling of long-held secrets, and examine the devastating ways women’s lives were ruled by scandal, rumour, and reputation. This is gothic historic fiction at its best, and is easily one of my books of the year so far.
There’s no one reading this who hasn’t heard of Dracula. It’s one of those books that is so iconic, we tend to think we know all about if before we even read it, leaving us to wonder if it’s worth the time and effort. Having finally picked it up for myself last year, I can confidently say that it absolutely is. So much more nuanced than I expected, I loved its fascinating take on gender roles, the Victorian fixation with bodily and sexual corruption, and the timeless fear of the unknown. As a lover of gothic and horror fiction, it was really fun to see many of the foundations upon which those genres would flourish being set down. There is some very interesting use of queer coding to examine too, but above all else, it remains a gripping, atmospheric page turner.
It’s worth pointing out that this is very, very different from the recent Netflix adaptation, which only shares the book’s name and generally creepy nature. Jackson’s novel is a masterclass in the less is more approach to horror, completely forgoing gore or jump scares. Far more psychological than its screen counterpart, it creeps beneath your skin, forcing you to question what is real and which characters can be trusted. A rumination on the invasive influence of storytelling and fear, and the dangerous power of the imagination, themes of suppression, sisterhood, and belonging simmer to reach a breathless fever pitch. Intelligent, understated, and downright unsettling, this take on the classic haunted house narrative is all the better for its ambiguity.
