Best Gifts for Book Lovers

Two friends make video games together for thirty years. You do not need to care about games — nobody who loves this book does — because it is really about the kind of love that is not romance and has no word for itself. It crosses more taste boundaries than anything else here, which is exactly what you want when you are guessing.

One caveat: It has been very widely read since 2022, so a heavy reader may already own it. Keep the gift receipt.

One house in the Massachusetts woods, across four centuries of occupants — settlers, an apple farmer, a painter, a beetle. Each chapter changes form completely. It is inventive enough to feel like a gift to a serious reader and warm enough not to be homework.

One caveat: The shifting forms are the point, but a reader who wants one continuous story will find it restless.

An eighteenth-century shipwreck produces two sets of survivors and two irreconcilable accounts of what happened, and the book is about which one the Admiralty chose to believe. It reads at the pace of a novel while being entirely sourced, which is the trick this category exists to pull off.

A man keeps a journal of the endless statue-filled halls he lives in, and gradually works out what the House is. Under 250 pages, entirely its own thing, and one of very few books that people press on strangers. Its brevity is what makes it a good gift: it asks for an evening, not a fortnight.

One caveat: The first thirty pages are deliberately disorienting. Readers who need immediate footing sometimes stop before it turns.

The witch from the Odyssey narrates her own exile, and the book is far angrier and better than the premise sounds. No knowledge of Greek myth is required, which is the usual worry. The audiobook is also excellent if your person listens.

David Copperfield relocated to Appalachia during the opioid epidemic, narrated by the boy himself in a voice that carries 550 pages without tiring. This is the pick for a reader who complains that modern novels are slight.

One caveat: It is long and the subject is bleak in places. Not the right gift for someone who is having a hard year.

Three generations of a family in Kerala, in which one member of each drowns. It is enormous and unhurried in a way modern publishing rarely allows, and readers who love it describe living in it rather than reading it.

One caveat: Genuinely long. For a reader with forty minutes a week this becomes a reproach on the nightstand.

A count is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel in 1922 and spends decades there. It is the rare novel that is genuinely warm without being slight, which makes it the safest choice on this list for an older reader or a parent-in-law.

Nine stories, each taking a single idea completely seriously until it turns into an argument about being alive. Because they stand alone, this is the ideal book for a commute or a hospital waiting room, and it converts more short-story skeptics than anything else in print.