Tomasz, Guardian reader

Ever since my father presented me with a copy of The Unicorn, beautifully translated into my mother tongue, I have been an ardent admirer of Iris Murdoch’s. I went on to read all of her novels, plays and poetry with great enthusiasm. Before Christmas, I returned to her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, having remembered very little of it. Yet from the very first page, I was reminded why I have always loved her work so deeply: the prose is rich, precise, disciplined and meticulously detailed; the many characters are so vividly rendered that none appears two-dimensional; each experiences and processes reality in a way that feels distinct and unmistakably individual; and the pacing of events feels perfectly judged. Although the novel is threaded with philosophical reflections on goodness and love, these never feel laboured or artificially imposed. Rather, they emerge naturally as an integral part of the novel’s dense and intricate tapestry.

Alan Hollinghurst, author

I’ve spent a month reading two poets whose work has been part of my life for more than 50 years. John Fuller’s Marston Meadows opens with the immaculate corona of sonnets that inspired Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know, but these give only a foretaste of a collection that ranges, with amazing wit, agility and deep feeling, through the changing perspectives of old age (Fuller is 89). To my mind, the most moving and luminous of all his books. The Poems of Seamus Heaney, superbly edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis, contains surprises too: poems that were previously uncollected, some never seen before, and most of them fit to stand beside the literary landmarks of their time. It’s been as magical to find these new things as to reread the countless other poems known almost by heart.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Pan Macmillan. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Kelly, Guardian reader

I read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan with my Sauna Book Club (yes it’s a book club in a sauna – no, we don’t read in the sauna). I had enjoyed this title the first time I read it back in 2023, but this time I fell deep in to the story, maybe because of the time of year: this story is set at Christmastime in Dublin during the 1980s, with the eerie and unsettling backdrop of the local convent. I think it also touched a nerve because I have a daughter the same age as the girl that the protagonist Bill Furlong is trying to help. Bill is someone everyone deserves to know, someone who won’t look away – he makes the reader question their ethics and fills their hearts with hope. Keegan’s writing is so delicate, it amazes me how much she can say in one sentence. The book club enjoyed the book and we gave it a resounding 10/10.

Samantha Harvey, author

I read Choice by Neel Mukherjee a couple of months ago and it’s still echoing in me. It’s a novel of three stories – or perhaps one, in which the other two are embedded, so that we’re summoned into a labyrinth of moral uncertainty and offered no easy escape. It’s irresistible writing, elegant and shattering.

I’m about halfway through The Spare Room by Helen Garner, which is the first of her books I’ve read. She describes a kookaburra with a butter hangover, then with a few quick strokes conjures the radiance of a child and the spectre of death. I see why people rave about her, I will now too.

Iris Murdoch’s newly published Poems from an Attic span her life; they’re often written for a specific other, and I almost felt bad – voyeuristic – reading them. But obviously I did read them, fascinated and uplifted by their unerring soul, their frankness and care. The final poem, Macaw in the Snow, is a bolt of light. It made me cry on the train.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is published by Vintage. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Stuart, Guardian reader

I’ve spent the majority of December reading Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips. This is a remarkable novel about an alien invasion and an alternative history of Russia, set in 1924. The protagonist Benedykt Gieroslawski is sent to frozen Siberia to track down his father who is believed to be in cahoots with the invading Gleissen aliens who are slowly freezing the entirety of Europe. An incredible novel weighing in at nearly 1,200 pages. The world building and depth of character development are really something else.

A large part of the novel takes place on the Trans-Siberian express, which only adds to the story and character development. It’s a heavy read – not one for trying when the TV is on in the background, but definitely one for sitting down quietly with and immersing oneself in.

Each December, hundreds of thousands of diaspora Nigerians and Ghanaians travel to their ancestral home countries. For many, the draw is the end-of-year party season – better known as “Detty December”, a phrase popularised by Nigerian singer Mr Eazi in the late 2010s. This wave of travel used to simply be a time for diasporans to reunite with their families for Christmas, but in recent years it has evolved, with young people – who call themselves IJGBs (I Just Got Back) – making the most of the buzzing nightlife in cultural capitals Lagos and Accra.

This annual diaspora homecoming is now being fictionalised in The Full Picture by Canadian author Jessica Carmichael, a YA coming-of-age romance bringing the family reunions, festivities, and endless traffic of December to life on the page. The novel follows Robyn, a Canadian university student, who travels to Ghana during winter break for the first time since her Ghanaian mum died. On her trip, she uncovers family secrets and finds herself in a love triangle with Osei, her grandmother’s neighbour, and Kelvin, Osei’s childhood friend. The book was published by Hibiscus Press, which Carmichael founded herself with funding support from Edmonton Arts Council.

Like her protagonist, Carmichael is a Canadian of Ghanaian and Bajan descent. Growing up in Canada, she did not see YA fiction with characters that looked like her, and the African fiction she came across often tended to be more serious – so she wanted to represent young Africans in a light yet thoughtful way.

Her novel isn’t the first fiction to explore the Detty December phenomenon; a Nigerian publication, Noisy Streetss, has published short story anthologies on “Love in Detty December”. But in The Full Picture, Carmichael captures Detty December in Ghana in longform fiction from the perspective of a diasporan travelling home. “It is something that you don’t really see in fiction,” says Carmichael, adding that she would “love to see more”.

Carmichael points out that there is scope for Detty December fiction to be explored from other cultural perspectives, given that people from the world over travel to west Africa in December. She would love to see stories “from a Black American perspective, from a Caribbean perspective”.

It was after visiting Ghana for the first time in 2019 to see her grandmother that Carmichael was inspired to write her novel. At the time, it was the Year of the Return, a government initiative that invited the Black diaspora to visit Ghana to commemorate 400 years since the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in Virginia. Carmichael says the trip “changed the trajectory of my life”.

On her return to Canada, she read a lot of Ghanaian fiction that brought her closer to her culture, and later decided she wanted to write a novel herself. Her book features all the hallmarks of Detty December, from the vibrant nightlife to the inflated prices and different diasporas coming together to reconnect with their cultures. “I felt that there was a massive gap in the market, and I wanted to write a story that could make people feel as if they were back there when reading it,” she says.

Carmichael sees her novel as a departure from other writing on diasporic travel and migration. She had noticed a trope of disillusionment and alienation from the culture in books on diasporans travelling home. Visiting Ghana herself, Carmichael’s experience was very different – she felt embraced and welcomed by the local community.

Carmichael hopes her book – which has found fans on TikTok – will inspire more people to write about Detty December. “I’m all for it, because you go for maybe three, four weeks and you come home and you’re back to regular life. So I think it would be amazing to relive it in fiction.”