In a hard year, at least the reading was good. Of the 147 books I’ve read to date, the worthwhile titles I most often press onto people include Susan Fletcher’s character-study/retirement-home mystery, The Night in Question, and Percival Everett’s latest brilliance, James, a subversive retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from his enslaved companion’s complicated point of view. Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst’s examination of class, sexuality and social upheaval, told through the life of an Anglo-Burmese actor as he moves through privileged spaces, is another winner. Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s visceral debut novel about teen girls in a Reno, Nev., boxing competition, and Liz Moore’s sprawling and unusual whodunnit, God of the Woods, also stuck with me.
Out of the Past
For every galley and new book I read, I tend to reach for an old one. The cracking fun of Rivals, the addictively bonkers Disney+ adaptation, inspired me (and many others) to reacquaint themselves with the horny aristocrats of Jilly Cooper’s original 1988 novel, part of the Rutshire Chronicles books. Likewise, the shape-shifting magical couple at the heart of My Lady Jane, the wildly entertaining adaptation on Prime (inexplicably cancelled shortly after its critically acclaimed first season) led me to the original swashbuckling Tudor romp published by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows in 2016.
As my periodic round-ups of reissues attest, it’s for the better if these forgotten books are newly available, thanks to a major publishing trend. In its influential 10 Best Books of the Year list, unveiled last week, the New York Times gave one of the coveted slots to Cold Crematorium. The 1950 Auschwitz memoir, by Jewish journalist and inmate József Debreczeni, recently translated into English for the first time, is considered a lost classic.
Over the summer, I gave friends copies of The Wedding, the final work of Harlem Renaissance figure Dorothy West. Though the idea for the novel took shape in the 1960s, it was only published in 1995 – three years before she died and nearly 50 years after her first book. In between, West worked as a journalist and wrote short stories about the inner politics of the African-American upper middle class. When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – West’s friend, Martha’s Vineyard neighbour and eventual editor at Doubleday – discovered the work-in-progress was languishing, she helped guide it to completion. West dedicated the short, quietly spectacular novel to Onassis, who died shortly before publication.
My current go-to for neglected titles is Smith & Taylor Classics, a new imprint from Unnamed Press. Instead of introducing a bygone book by commissioning an explanatory intro or afterword by a contemporary writer, the context is supplied by two cultural experts. For instance, The Odd Women, George Gissing’s 1893 novel about unmarried women in Victorian society, pairs fiction writer Adam Dalva with New Yorker literary critic Merve Emre, and transcribes their conversation. I adored the new edition of Twilight Sleep, Edith Wharton’s Jazz Age satire about socialites, not least because the cleverly reframed introduction to the work made me feel smart.
The Cat Lady Era
A recent report from Bowker, an American book analysis company, charts the growing influence of self-publishing: the number of titles with ISBN barcodes topped 2.7 million last year, outstripping books from traditional publishers by two million. It’s a shift embodied by the phenomenal, New York Times bestseller-list success of romance queen Colleen Hoover, who self-published her first book on Amazon in 2012.
This year, Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour Book racked up more than 800,000 sales over the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend alone. Swift self-published the coffee-table tome, bypassing established publishing houses, distributors and – if the number of typos is any indication – copy editors. Such a high-interest book, arriving just in time for the holidays, would have been a boon for indie booksellers, but instead the superstar made an exclusive deal with American retail chain Target, and dropped it on Black Friday. That’s capitalism for ya.
Largely thanks to Swift, “childless cat lady” topped Yale University’s most memorable 2024 phrases. The pop superstar used it as her sign-off in an Instagram endorsement of U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris, as a riposte to U.S. vice president-elect JD Vance, who used the phrase as a misogynist slur. To understand how we got here, Kathryn Hughes’ fascinating book, Catland, helps by illuminating the career and influence of eccentric Victorian British artist Louis Wain. His hugely popular anthropomorphic drawings of cats (drinking, and in top hats) spurred the cat craze at the turn of the last century, transforming the feral creatures into the domesticated objects of our affection. Felines and other animals also take a starring role in a publishing sub-genre called healing fiction, as I outlined in a recent round-up of Warm and Fuzzy comfort reads. As a cat mom, this is unsurprisingly my favourite new trend, but dog lovers who can’t get enough of Wicked might look up queer fantasy writer A.J. Hackwith’s Toto, a retelling of the Oz adventures from the wisecracking pooch’s point of view, which has become a word-of-mouth hit.
Creature comforts are flourishing, but for a reassuring read that does not feature a talking terrier, I disappeared into Small Bomb at Dimperley, Lissa Evans’ latest historical novel. The family saga and love story is set in a country house at the end of the Second World War, and it’s another warm hug from the author of Their Finest Hour and a Half that captures social change and matches realism with a dollop of hopeful uplift.
Companionable Chapters
Pantone certainly read the room when they unveiled their 2025 Color of the Year, Mocha Mousse, and revealed their sense of humour. The whipped-dessert shade matches the colour of the doo-doo emoji, which feels pretty on-the-nose for the tumultuous political reversal we’re seeing south of the border, as well as what’s in store from the new American government. In another distressing move, HarperCollins signed a deal to license backlist non-fiction titles for AI training – the first of the major publishers to do so – which raises more questions than it answers for authors, copyright and creativity, but we can start figuring that out after the holidays.
When filled with suffocating dread and rage, I find relentlessly plotty procedurals a balm. They dispense a measure of justice that, increasingly, feels elusive in real life. The Dark Wives, the latest Vera Stanhope mystery, came out in October, and British crime author Ann Cleeves toured western Canada with it. The suspenseful story forms the basis of the January conclusion to the enormously popular television adaptation. Although the series has become a sensation, in my opinion it has diminished even as the novels have only gotten better, but I adore the cranky rumpled detective and will be bereft when lead Brenda Blethyn, 78, takes a final bow. Others find the counterintuitive gloom of Gothic themes a comfort in our present age, and the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas is just one example.
HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS FOR BIBLIOPHILES
Bookish Pursuits
Books still make the best gifts (so tidy to wrap!), as do simple adjacent novelties. With Herb Lester’s literary fold-out maps, fans can follow in the footsteps of favourite fictional characters and, as I did in September, take a self-guided tour of London’s seedy Slow Horses haunts with Lamb’s London (including the bench in front of the Globe Theatre that Diana Taverner uses for discreet meets); there’s also John Le Carré’s London, The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles and Maigret’s Paris. Based on Slow Horses author Mick Herron’s endorsement, I picked up Simon Mason’s engaging DI Ryan Wilkins procedurals, my favourite crime discovery this year; start with A Killing in November and keep reading until you’re caught up by the time the fourth installment, A Voice in the Night, comes out in mid-January. The well-plotted series recalls Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse in that it involves a mismatched pair of detectives among the Oxford well-to-do. The partners happen to have the same surname, but are otherwise opposites: Ryan Wilkins is a gifted but mouthy upstart from a hardscrabble background, and Ray Wilkins is a high-achieving Black man with an Oxford University degree. The books probe the fault lines of class and race through their evolving relationship and the cases they investigate.
HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS FOR HIGH-SOCIETY AFICIONADOS
Women In Art
Paula Hawkins’ The Blue Hour, a psychological thriller about a woman making art on her own terms, fits neatly into the deep publishing category of herstory and of women creating under the fraught weight of domestic and societal expectations. It’s something Begoña Gomez Urzaiz’s provocative The Abandoners explores, looking at the mothers and so-called monsters who choose themselves over their families. That’s of a piece with the maternal ambivalence of Amy Adams in Nightbitch, based on Rachel Yoder’s novel about a beleaguered mother, an artist and gallerist, who puts her career on indefinite hold to raise her child. She goes feral; those familiar with the source novel know that metaphor gets literalized as the story progresses.
I was inspired to seek out more biographies of neglected women artists by following the Art Herstory website and seeing “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe” at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History Told Through Ten Exhibitions by New York curator Daniel Belasco, which chronicles groundbreaking 1940s and 1950s women, was a highlight (especially ahead of the rich retrospective of Pop Art pioneer Marisol at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). Then I travelled to London just in time to take in “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920” at the Tate Britain (and pick up the book of the show). The big draw was Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous 1638 self-portrait (Elizabeth Fremantle’s acclaimed historical novel Disobedient has only burnished the painter’s legacy, and just won the Historical Writers Association’s top award). But I found myself ogling Mary Delany’s breathtaking cut-paper flowers (an obsession since I read Canadian poet Molly Peacock’s book about her, The Paper Garden). I also stood for ages in front of “My Lady of the Rocks,” my favourite painting by Dame Laura Knight, who was the first British woman elected to the Royal Academy of Arts as a full member in 1937, and the first female since the 18th century. To learn more about other women who forged a path in that era I picked up Bluestockings by Susannah Gibson, about a fierce group of female intellectuals, then Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra’s biography of quirky Boston museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner. There’s also a new edition of Alice James, Jean Strouse’s 1980 biography about the diarist sister of novelist Henry James.
HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS FOR NOSTALGIA FANS
To Be Continued…
It seemed inevitable that the sequel-itis currently afflicting the film industry would spill over into publishing. And it has, but more creatively, with authors adding to what were originally stand-alone novels. For example, with Long Island, Colm Tóibín checked in on the Irish heroine of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey, and her life in midcentury America, and Elizabeth Strout delivered another welcome helping of Lucy Barton in Tell Me Everything.
Novels about the power of community were matched by narrative non-fiction, like Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s examination of the similarities and friction of two very different 1970s essayists, cultural figures and onetime friends, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. It kept me company and reconfirmed that I’m definitely Team Babitz. Many other writers are alert to the fact that cultivating and nurturing close ties spurs growth and helps us through fraught times, so books about friendship, such as Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others and Maggie Nelson’s Like Love, are essential reminders that we need to honour non-romantic relationships – and they make a lovely gift for friends.
Screen Time
Like many avid readers, I tend to approach screen adaptations of beloved books with caution. Not Bob Dylan. The icon, 83, tweeted his endorsement of the movie A Complete Unknown last week by urging followers to read Dylan Goes Electric!, the 2005 Elijah Wald book it’s based on. The movie is a handsome, if by-the-numbers, biopic of Dylan’s emergence as a folk star. It doesn’t hit cinemas until Christmas Day, so it was funny to see Dylan getting ahead of it (as opposed to the two weeks in 2016 it took him to thank the Swedish Academy for awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature).
Two superb works of fiction, Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner The Nickel Boys and Claire Keegan’s bestselling 2021 novella Small Things Like These, have become high-profile films and I re-read both books before the preview screenings. I was dazzled (and relieved) at the inventive beauty of Nickel Boys, directed by photographer and visual art professor RaMell Ross, which conveys the friendship, loyalty and visceral experiences of Black boys at Florida’s infamous Dozier reform school. The way Ross interprets the source material using a (mostly) first-person camera point of view is unforgettable. So is Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy in his first role since he won the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer. His performance preserves the interiority and observational delicacy of Keegan’s tale about an honourable man struggling to do good over Christmas in small-town rural Ireland.
I’m trying not to turn this into a literary recommendation extravaganza, but it seems I’m failing. So I’ll sign off with a seasonal gem for the many, many devotees of Keegan’s short stories and novellas that I’ve been calling this year’s Small Things Like These: Norwegian writer Ingvild H. Rishoi’s newly translated Brightly Shining, a short, moving novel about poverty, hardship and childhood wishes as Christmastime. Reality is delicately balanced with the glimmer of hope I think we all need right now.
