Jeremy Halvard Prynne, known as JH Prynne, a maverick figure in British poetry, died on 22 April at the age of 89.

“Jeremy was an extraordinary and original human, which is no surprise because he was an extraordinary and original poet,” said Peter Gizzi, the American poet who introduced a reissue of Prynne’s 1969 collection The White Stones. “The word ‘genius’ gets tossed around, but if anyone was, he certainly was.”

Born in Bromley, Kent, in June 1936, Prynne served two years in the British army before studying English at Cambridge, graduating in 1960. He pursued a fellowship at Harvard before returning to Cambridge, becoming a fellow at Gonville and Caius college. He ultimately became director of studies in English, and for 37 years was also the college librarian.

Prynne’s first collection, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962. A second, Kitchen Poems, appeared in 1968. Influenced by the likes of Charles Olson, Prynne – in both his teaching and his poems – bridged American postmodern and British poetry circles, and acted as a liberating force on the latter. He was prolific, publishing dozens of collections across the decades, almost exclusively with small presses, and emerged as a cult figure despite his aversion to publicity, interviews, poetry readings and having his photograph taken.

His work has been collected in two volumes titled Poems, the second of which was published in 2024. “While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events,” wrote David Wheatley in a review. “Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.”

A common observation, made by fans and critics alike, was that Prynne’s poetry was hard to parse. “Whether we ‘understood’ Prynne’s poetry or not, we were ardent admirers already,” wrote the British novelist Geoff Nicholson in 2011. “The obscurity was part of the appeal.”

The journalist John Simpson, who worked with Prynne in the 1960s on Granta magazine, “couldn’t understand” Prynne’s poetry, “and still can’t, but he was a charming, witty, elegant figure”, he wrote on X, following news of the poet’s death.

Beyond Cambridge, Prynne also taught and lectured at Surrey, Sussex and at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Along with his poetry, he published lectures and criticism on subjects ranging from Willem de Kooning to Shakespeare.

Prynne’s “generosity is legion; his teaching is the stuff of legend,” added Gizzi, whose recent collection, Fierce Elegy, won the TS Eliot prize. “For all his astounding brilliance he was down to earth and deeply kind. I cherish every moment I was fortunate enough to be in his company. He was and will remain a bright element. His passing is an enormous and incalculable loss to the world of UK letters.”

Upward Bound is a dismal adult daycare centre in the Los Angeles suburbs, with “poop-coloured” walls and a small swimming pool out the back. The name on the sign is cruelly misleading because Upward Bound serves as a dumping ground for the city’s disabled community, a pen to hold people who have aged out of school. Any inmate who manages to clamber free – be it up, down or sideways – has slipped the net, beaten the odds and might therefore be viewed as a small miracle.

The author Woody Brown feels similarly touched with magic, having swerved the hell of adult care in pursuit of a professional writing career. He’s the first non-speaking autistic graduate of UCLA and a 2024 alumnus of the writing programme at Columbia University; Upward Bound, his triumphant first novel, looks back not with anger but with compassion and grace. Brown feels for the centre’s exhausted staff almost as much as he does for its mouldering, desperate “clients”, who are forced to map out their days with pointless time-wasting activities. Upward Bound – a jailbreak story of sorts – suggests that practically everyone here has been falsely imprisoned. His book is the literary equivalent of sending the ladder back down.

“I am the echolalic kid,” explains Walter, the tale’s autistic main player and presumably Brown’s alter ego, who lifts lines from Thomas the Tank Engine and Toy Story 3 as an approximation of speech and inevitably struggles to get his true message across. Walter scored straight As at community college and dreams of becoming a writer, but his prospects are dim. “The bottom line is being able to communicate”: non‑speakers rarely land even menial work. For the foreseeable future, then, he’s marooned at Upward Bound, parked next to people he’s known half his life but has never once spoken to. He thinks he loves Emma, a fellow client, and that she might love him back. But when they stand side by side in the rec room they might be 100 miles apart, communing on a different plane altogether, like two whales in the ocean listening out for sonic booms.

It’s tempting to file Brown’s illuminating insider account alongside the work of other neurodivergent artists – Turner prize-winner Nnena Kalu; the architectural illustrator Stephen Wiltshire – except that this would only be reaching for another crude holding pen. Upward Bound is at pains to emphasise the difference of its characters – the range of conditions and presentations that complicate this community of outcasts. No one person is alike or even necessarily on the same page, and so the book gives us multiple viewpoints, occasionally of the same scene. Its lively criss-crossing structure weaves from first person to third, and from Walter through the staff and the clients, casually exploding the lie that autistic people lack empathy.

There are no monsters or villains inside Upward Bound. Jorge, the hulking problem case, only wants more time with his comfort toy. Dave, the stressed-out manager, is stressed out for a reason. At one point the perspective hops out of the centre altogether to frame the thoughts of Avery, a bored Target checkout girl. The inmates are brought in by bus every Friday and she observes their unhurried comings and goings. “The weird group slowly moves into the store,” she reports. “There are 10 people and two handlers. People. Of course they’re people. It’s just that they look fuzzy around the edges, as if they haven’t fully materialised after their interplanetary transport.” Brown’s prose draws connections and pulls his figures into focus. Avery is at least curious, and she watches the group with sharp eyes.

This tolerant spirit extends to the daycare centre itself. It’s “an insane asylum”, Walter tells us. “A dead-end way-station.” And yet for at least one of the staff, the place is a lifeline. Carlos is the closest thing Upward Bound has to a saint, a tattooed former tearaway who finds his purpose and passion in his work as a carer. The novel is episodic, a series of vivid character sketches. But it is Carlos’s hunt for the absconded Jorge that gathers its threads and forces them to a climax.

As for Brown, his story arc as a novelist is just getting started, and it’s hard to imagine a more vertiginous lift-off than this. His book is flawed in the way that most good first novels are flawed: it overexplains, provides too much exposition and information. That’s a common failing in debut authors and surely doubly so for one who has spent his whole life off the page trying to make himself understood. But Upward Bound is also funny and moving and ringing with life; a book that embraces the difficulty and contradictions of its subject matter. It’s the garrulous, charming story of a young man who can’t speak, and an inclusive, friendly guide to the overlooked and the isolated. One obvious measure of great fiction is its ability to transport you to a whole other world. Sometimes the world contains spacemen, dragons and amazing talking trains. Sometimes it’s one that’s right under your nose.

Novelist Sarah Perry’s memoir of her late father-in-law, David, chronicles the period from his first signs of illness, when he began to have trouble swallowing, to his diagnosis of oesophageal cancer, to his death at the age of 77 just nine days later.

We first meet David, a retired chemist from Norwich, on a day trip with Perry and her husband in the summer of 2022. The three of them have gone to Great Yarmouth where, seemingly in good health, David gleefully eats four hot doughnuts. She reveals him as an unassuming man who lives in a bungalow, drinks Yorkshire Tea, delights in telling bad jokes, and likes doing sudoku and watching Antiques Roadshow on TV. But right at the start, Perry notes that David’s death was only weeks away. Though his illness was mercifully short, the speed at which it progressed caught his family unawares, leaving precious little time to prepare.

In this moving and sharply observed book, Perry takes the common event that is terminal illness and elevates it to the realms of extraordinary as she recounts the physical and psychological changes in her father-in-law, the ministrations of doctors and carers, and the relentless form-filling. The narrator is the actor Lydia Leonard, whose reading is serious without veering too far into solemnity. David’s death is devastating for those who love him but, in the greater scheme of things, it is by no means unexpected. Perry’s account of his final weeks is required listening to understand an experience that for many feels unfathomable.

Available via Vintage Digital, 5hr 12min

Further listening

Dirty Money
Charlotte Philby, Baskerville, 9hr 59min
A journalist turned private eye and a government investigator join forces in this compelling thriller about power, corruption and exploitation in present-day London. Read by Kirsten Foster and Victoria Fox.

The New Age of Sexism
Laura Bates, Simon & Schuster Audio, 8hr 35min
The activist and author of Everyday Sexism and Men Who Hate Women narrates her investigation into the misogyny coded into AI. Tackling themes including chatbots, deepfake videos and cyber brothels, Bates reveals how AI perpetuates myths and harmful tropes about women.

Roger Casement had a life that defies categorisation: an imperial administrator who exposed imperial atrocities; a one-time diplomat for the United Kingdom who enlisted German help in Ireland’s fight for freedom; a closeted gay man who left detailed records of his sexual adventures; a knight of the realm convicted of conspiring against the crown.

TE Lawrence (“of Arabia”), himself no stranger to the hypocrisy of British imperialism and the difficulties of illegal sexuality, called Casement a “broken archangel”. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, retains some of that poetry in this deeply researched and fascinating account of Casement’s role in the creation of the Irish state.

The bulk of the action in A Rebel and a Traitor takes place between 1914 and 1916. At the start of this period, Casement – still respected in London as a recently retired consul in Britain’s diplomatic service – gives evidence to a royal commission in 1914 on the regulation of service overseas. By the end, he is awaiting execution for treason at Pentonville prison.

In between, the ex-diplomat travelled to the US to rally support for the Irish cause; to Germany, to raise an army to fight the British; to Ireland on the eve of the Easter Rising; and then back to London, this time as a captive.

Casement was bequeathed, in Carroll’s words, a “fractured identity” as the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother who were both dead by the time he was 12. He was courteous and tireless and, in the words of the man who killed him, “the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute”.

A depressive nomad who felt lonely even among friends, he joined the colonial service in the late 19th century and served in Africa, where he became so appalled by the plight of rubber workers in the Belgian Congo that he worked tirelessly to expose their exploitation. His experiences there, as well as in South Africa during the Boer war, were to turn him decisively against colonialism, and he left government in 1913.

Casement’s nemesis was Reginald “Blinker” Hall, an arrogant and obsessive naval captain with a facial tic who headed up the British admiralty’s intelligence service and, through his access to decrypted telegrams between Germany and the US, tracked the Irishman’s attempts to enlist Berlin to the cause of Irish independence. Alongside the two of them is a cast of nationalists, socialists, imperialists, viceroys, rural police officers, bewildered agricultural labourers and more.

Carroll’s achievement is to situate this by turns tragic, farcical and heroic duel within the broader context of the first world war without ever allowing it to be overshadowed by the slaughter elsewhere. The U-boat commander who delivered Casement to Ireland had, just a few months earlier, sunk the Lusitania and thus killed more than 1,000 people – but the focus remains on the smaller battle within the global conflict.

In normal times, Casement might have ended up making speeches on Hyde Park Corner or writing articles for niche publications. In the heightened circumstances of world war, however, when young men were marched to their deaths by the thousand and governments took risks they would never normally contemplate, he won an audience among Britain’s adversaries, and the chance to change the destiny of his nation.

Casement was recaptured shortly after his return to Ireland, so his attempt to lead his nation to freedom was – in crude terms – a failure. However, along with the similarly abortive Rising in Dublin, it helped create the mood of defiance that led to open war and the once impossible-seeming dream of an Irish state becoming reality.

At the end of the book, I did find myself wishing it went on to analyse the reasons for the eventual defeat of British rule in the years following Casement’s execution, and to describe more fully the more consequential Irish leaders of the time. However, that is not what Carroll is here to do, and he succeeds in his core task of humanising a complex man, giving him credit for his strengths while never hiding his flaws, not least his penchant for young and vulnerable sexual partners.

There have been attempts to film Casement’s life in the past – a 1934 Hollywood screenplay even imagined a tearful parting from a blond girlfriend – and I would not be surprised if a producer reads this book and decides to have another go. There would surely be a lot of competition for the chance to play the role of this strange, fascinating, improbable man.

If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.

Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For a while, this bold, creative young woman shaped how westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity and public life.

Then the 1979 revolution arrived, and cultural crackdowns pushed secular art and music underground. In 1980, Googoosh was arrested and (along with other singers and actors) banned from performing, recording or appearing publicly. She withdrew into private life, but her songs continued to circulate underground, and my generation played her music just as much as our parents had: to dance, to grieve, to fall in love. I listen to Nafas on repeat after every heartbreak, or when I just need a big, dramatic cry. Even after she went quiet, Googoosh was the emblem of a lost Iran, its joyful culture, rich artistic history, and its bold, powerful women.

Her memoir uses her 1980 arrest as a framing device. After a series of interrogations, she is thrown into a cell with her old friend, the singer and film actor Marjan, and the narrative shifts between prison and the past. In prison, Googoosh’s treatment by the clerics is terrifying, but crammed together in filthy, unpredictable conditions, the women make do, telling each other their stories to distract themselves.

Googoosh describes a pitiless childhood: the pain of her mother’s departure, days spent serving her father’s abusive new wife, Mouness, and protecting her brothers from their stepmother’s wrath. In those days, the stage was her only reliable refuge and her sole power (as breadwinner) against Mouness. But Googoosh soon left home and, at 17, she married, the first of many unions that crumbled under the pressures of celebrity, public scrutiny and repressive expectations.

In public, though, she was free: she wore what she wanted, moved how she wanted, spoke about love in ways most women couldn’t. Her short haircut, her miniskirts, her bold eyeliner and her vulnerability on stage were enthralling to other women. After the crackdowns on secular music, Iranian women equated the silencing of their most beloved performer with their own, and her disappearance from public life turned her into a kind of lost saint. They remembered her privately through old cassette tapes: the pretty face of their unspent youth, their desires and their yearning to be heard.

Clearly, then, a memoir from Googoosh is exciting for her fans and an important part of our cultural archive. And it’s a genuine pleasure to read her stories, with their infuriating power imbalances and dramatic turns. But Googoosh deserved a more seasoned memoirist as her co-writer. Her (lived) story is a complicated one, full of cultural texture and interpersonal nuance, and it carries historical weight. It merits a sophisticated telling with a powerfully crafted narrative and attention to the particulars of Googoosh’s voice. With its Iranian inflection stripped or mangled, the writing tips constantly into cliche, one-note characters and melodrama. (At a concert: “It felt like there was a giant octopus with tentacles spreading all over the massive space, causing a wave to form, a wave of energy that grew exponentially as it rushed toward the stage before hitting me and the musicians.”) How much more subtle and luminous this memoir might have been if given to a skilled literary hand. Still, it’s Googoosh and she deserves our attention. She has lived a brave and remarkable life that everyone should know about.

She was finally allowed to leave Iran in 2000. In exile, she rebuilt her life from the ground up, releasing new music and touring worldwide. Googoosh’s first performance (in Toronto) after two silent decades was historic: audiences wept, remembering all that had been lost. Soon her concerts became intergenerational gatherings again: older Iranians reconnecting with pre-revolutionary memories and their third-culture kids (and grandkids) discovering a piece of their identity through her music. For Iranian women of my mother’s generation, though, the ones who suffered most at the hands of brutish men, watching their idol reclaim her spotlight was a kind of revival – as if they, too, were getting another shot at everything they’d missed.

In 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist Robert Lang for the New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA convention to take Lang’s workshop on folding a “Taiwan goldfish”. I was with her, a radio producer trying to capture the sounds of paper creasing as Orlean attempted to keep pace with the “Da Vinci of origami”, wincing when her goldfish’s fins didn’t exactly flutter in hydrodynamic splendour.

It was Orlean in her element: an adventurous student, inquisitive and exacting, fully alive to the mischief inherent to reporting – and primed to extract some higher truth. “When we first met you said something to me I’ve never forgotten,” Orlean told Lang. “That paper has a memory – that once you fold it, you can never entirely remove the fold.” Was that, she wondered, an insight about life, too?

Over the course of four decades, seven books and countless exquisite magazine features, Orlean has profiled celebrities and nobodies, followed cults and choirs, turned her eye to supermarkets and surfers. “Writers fall into two categories: there are those who have something they want to say to the world, and there are those who believe the world has something to tell them,” she observes. Orlean falls squarely into the second camp. There are two kinds of story she likes best: “hiding in plain sight” and “who knew?”.

A memoir is usually neither of these sorts of stories, but Orlean rises to the challenge of writing about her own life with grace. Joyride follows another thread she has repeatedly returned to in her work: the nature of obsession. At the Willamette Week in Portland, where she got her start, the editor preached that “no matter how small or narrow its focus, every story was meaningful”. Orlean married a likeminded Week staffer and got her big break covering the Rajneesh cult for the Village Voice.

The subjects of her pieces from this time – for the Voice, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Vogue and the New Yorker – are a cultural time capsule. There’s a history of Lycra, profiles of Bon Jovi and the artist Christo, an investigation into the folding practices at Benetton. Assignments are elastic, and so are budgets. While negotiating the terms of a New Yorker feature about a Bronx cab driver who had found himself elected the king of the Ashanti people in the United States, she is merely told, “Sphinx-like” by editor Chip McGrath, that her expense budget will be enough to cover travel to Ghana if “necessary”. Her final payment? “It will be sufficient.” “I don’t need to tell you that magazines don’t work that way any more,” she writes.

Joyride represents the liner notes to a career of hits. There’s the deliciously “heady, fun, surreal” experience of watching Spike Jonze’s movie Adaptation, based on her book The Orchid Thief, come to life – including being played by Meryl Streep. (Orlean’s account of flipping open Charlie Kaufman’s script for the first time to discover herself in it is laugh-out-loud funny.) A memorable Twitter thread from 2020 – the result of too much rosé on an empty stomach – that made her the “patron saint of pandemic drinking”, gets its moment, too. And harder episodes: a divorce, a cancer diagnosis, the sorrow of moving her mother into a nursing home.

Orlean sees the writing life as one of constant highwire creative reinvention – “you never build equity”,  is how she puts it. Her father, who wanted to be writer but became a businessman instead, might have agreed: after she published The Orchid Thief he suggested she consider finally enrolling in law school. Thank goodness she didn’t. “I felt called, I really did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry – to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised.”

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.

Most years, I like to give novels as holiday gifts, but this year I am thinking of sharing either Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations or one of Byung-Chul Han’s books, particularly The Burnout Society or The Spirit of Hope. The South Korean-German philosopher describes himself as an “optimistic refugee”, and his style is quite distinctive, blending various disciplines and philosophical traditions from east and west. These short but dense books may not exactly be cheerful, Christmassy reads, but they make excellent companions for anyone interested in “thinking about thinking” in a digital world of noise and distraction; for anyone concerned about the future of humanity.

There is a book I buy as a present that never goes out of fashion. It is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. It is hardly about a soldier at all, but the title is good because it distracts people and thus the extraordinary plot creeps up and bites you before you know where you are. The narrative curls and twists; the narrator knows too much or too little. But at some point the appalling and ingenious nature of the treachery – what is called “cheating” nowadays – becomes apparent and you feel that you have been let in on some intriguing and explosive secret. It is perfect, thus, for Christmas.

To the young people in my life I give Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It’s a series of perfect micro-fictions that both stand alone and build towards a deepening message on the nature of reality. It’s also an optimistic text that locates power in the individual. We can change things – if we know where to put our energy.

To my contemporaries, I give out whatever I think will do them good! Books are more than entertainment. We shouldn’t be shy about wanting to provoke or challenge our friends – or ourselves. This year it’s Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?

I’ve given copies of Claire Keegan’s Foster to so many friends, I worry about unwittingly doubling up. At just 88 pages, it makes a slender gift, but one that won’t sit onerously on a bedside table and whose concision hints at its specialness. Set over one Irish summer, the story is told through a child’s eyes, as she is sent to live with relatives during the final weeks of her mother’s pregnancy. Coming from a household of neglect into one of warmth, the girl’s observations about people reveal both a guilelessness and devastating insight.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is a gorgeous, brave and nuanced account of the novelist’s life – anchored in an astonishingly truthful exploration of her relationship with her mother, Mary. She describes her as “my shelter and my storm”, and in the book’s pages we meet Mary the celebrated feminist campaigner and Mary the volatile, threatening mother. Without ever flattening or reducing this formidable and complicated woman, Roy parses the ways her own life has developed – both as a rejection and as homage to her mother. The work is also unapologetically political, and after the horrors in Gaza, I appreciate an author who can speak to the world we are in. The book is beautifully bound and makes for a lovely gift, and I haven’t stopped buying it for people since the day it was published.

When The Wind in the Willows first came out, the reviews were mixed. “As a contribution to natural history,” said one, “it is negligible.” AA Milne set out to proclaim its genius. He used to give copies to people “as a test of character”. I feel the same about Terry Pratchett’s Truckers. It’s the story of a group of Nomes who have come to believe that the department store in which they live is the entire universe (its slogan is “everything under one roof”). A satire on consumerism, sexism, dogmatism and … you name it, it is above all warm, hilarious and wise.

Sarah Crossan’s Where the Heart Should Be is a gripping and moving free verse novel set in the time of the famine in Ireland. It brings you face to face with the tragedy and solidarity of those times. So-called YA, but a great read for anyone.

I have two books I keep stocks of to give as gifts. One, for book-hungry older children, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: it’s dauntingly huge, yes, but also one of the most perfect adventure stories ever written, and I have found that the children it does catch hold of become dizzy with the pleasure of it. The other, to lure in children who have not yet become eager readers, is Sharna Jackson’s superbly witty High Rise Mystery series; I’ve not yet met a child who doesn’t adore it.

The book I have most often given, for over 20 years now, is Alice Oswald’s Dart, her miraculous translation of a river into polyphonic poetry. Ecologically and philosophically it is profoundly (and increasingly!) radical, and line by line it is a pure enlivening delight to read. I give it to people who never read poetry, as well as poetry experts. I give it to visitors, friends, newlyweds, students, grievers, swimmers; and I hope they pass it on to others, because nobody owns a river.

Since 2010, all five stories shortlisted for the BBC National short story award have been published in book form by the wonderful Comma Press. It’s always a stellar shortlist, varied in all ways other than quality. As gifts go, the anthology is perfect: first-rate fiction, the stories as compact as the physical book itself (you can carry it in the deep pocket of a winter coat). And, best of all, next Christmas you can give it to the discerning reader all over again.

As I’ve got older, it’s become harder for me to engage with books on that magical level that feels as if the whole world were concentrated in the palms of your hands. So when it does happen, the impulse is to share it. Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly is a gentle and compassionate novel that explores the nuances of queer love and friendship, the moral dilemmas of sharing someone else’s life through life writing, and the choices we make for our chosen family and those bound to us by blood. I’ve given it to many people so far, but the most significant was to the Casual Readers book club, where, uncommonly, there was unanimous love for the book.

Over the years the books I’ve tended to give most? Wise Children by Angela Carter and When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson. Carter’s final novel is infused with such a high-kicking joyousness that it’s a pleasure to hand it to anyone. Atkinson is always good news, and this work of humane detective fiction is so satisfying that I can give it to folk who don’t know her work, trusting they’ll love it. But this past year the book I’ve found myself giving to most people is Michael Kohlhaas, a slim novella from 1810 by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann. Why is the world in such conflagration again? Kleist’s tale about the consequences of injustice will never not be relevant and is so thrilling that once I started reading it I couldn’t stop for anything. Stunning.

I’m a lover of short stories and one of my favourite collections is Sarah Hall’s Sudden Traveller. The stories are simply stunning in their emotional and imaginative leap; her use of language is beautiful and glittering. As far as gifts are concerned, this is one you could give to someone who likes a quick yet wholly transporting read.

“Amos, a mouse, lived by the ocean.” Everybody in my family – maybe in my life – knows the opening line of the picture book Amos & Boris by William Steig. It’s the story of an unlikely friendship between a shipwrecked rodent and a kind-hearted whale, and it’s a combination of plainspoken and magical and deeply, even existentially, philosophical. There’s nobody in my life I wouldn’t give this book to – especially children and friends, and children who are friends – except there’s nobody I can give it to, since I have already given it to everybody.

I can tell which books I really love because I never have copies on my bookshelf. These are the ones I repeatedly give away, so that my shelves have become a repository for all the books that are not my actual favourites. Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask is a novel I have bought on many occasions. For anyone who needs reminding how straight-up fun reading can be, it’s a great reviver: funny, sharp, alive – and with a wonderfully dark undertow. I haven’t kept hold of a copy in years.

I give Rumer Godden’s novels to people – Kingfishers Catch Fire, perhaps, or The River – because a lot of readers don’t know her work. She’s such a warm and entrancing storyteller, but with a steely eye too, and ruthless truthfulness. She’s the best kind of comfort read.

I love to give Restoration by Rose Tremain at Christmas. I’ve never known anyone able to resist protagonist Robert Merivel – a young medical student who lands in the court of Charles II, rises quickly in the king’s favour, then suffers a catastrophic fall from grace. Honest, mischievous, spiritual and self-indulgent, Merivel is above all lovable. Tremain’s depiction of 17th-century life – contrasting the opulence of court with the brutality of the time – is gloriously bawdy one moment, and stop-in-your-tracks profound the next. And as an added bonus, the book’s cover, over the years, has always been Christmassy. Note: the sequel, Merivel: A Man of His Time, is just as wonderful – if not more so.

I often give Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Best known for the Moomins, Jansson was also a mistress of the short story, and The Summer Book shows both the gift for parable that underlies the best children’s picture books and the literary economy of short fiction. The central characters are a little girl and her grandmother, and the story turns around the missing mother without ever mentioning her. There’s lots of beautifully observed play and adventure and attention to the natural world. It’s set on a small Finnish island in midsummer, among people who know very well how to appreciate sunlight, so good midwinter reading.

At Christmas I often give the gift of Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book – a collection of short stories selected by Ali Smith, and an exquisite companion to The Summer Book. These stories reflect Jansson’s core passions: small boats, islands, and the vital need for art and inspiration. They’re about land and sea, youth and age; my favourite is a description of two elderly women locking up their home for the last time – a house on a remote rock in the Pellinge archipelago I was lucky enough to visit – leaving the key and some purposefully muddled instructions for anyone who may be passing by.

The book I’ve given most often – by a large margin – is a collection of poetry called Fear of Description by my friend Daniel Poppick. I bought it before I’d ever met Dan, and it had been a long time since I’d got anything out of poetry. I was relieved and amazed to find myself laughing aloud, and then winded with emotion by the final line. I’ve given it since to friends, lovers, at least one parent – partly because it’s a pleasure to share work by someone I’m proud to be friends with and partly because it’s a low-stakes burden gift-wise, something you can dip in and out of with ease and pleasure.

The new Ultimate Spider-Man series deserves everyone’s attention. Written by the legend that is Jonathan Hickman, alongside artist Marco Checchetto, it’s the Spidey reboot we’ve all been waiting for. There have been many reinventions of everyone’s favourite webslinger, but nothing meets the moment like this does, and with Hickman’s incredible attention to character, it’s the best Spidey’s been in years.

I am not sure if it’s wrong to suggest you give the same book to all the vegans in your life, as if suggesting that all vegans are the same, but I do think Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead fits this bill. I love to imagine people I know reading it, even people who eat meat, who would probably like it too. It’s kooky and fun and strange; it’s important without being depressing. I think a lot about the scene at the annual Mushroom Picker’s Ball, which Janina, the main character, attends dressed up as a wolf. Actually, this book is rather festive.

I was given a copy of JL Carr’s novella A Month in the Country many years ago by a work colleague and it’s a book I’ve gifted ever since, so that others can have the joy of reading it for the first time too. It’s a profound, funny, elegiac meditation on lost youth and unrequited love, so sharply observed and economically written that it can be devoured in one sitting. For me, that makes it the perfect present: immediately pleasurable and something that stays with you for life.

I occasionally give The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann, in the (so far unfulfilled) hope that one day somebody else will agree with me that for narrative complexity and jagged emotional impact there is almost nothing that comes close to it.

Recently, I’ve been giving Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Published a decade before Pachinko, it follows a Korean community in 00s Manhattan. I’m currently crawling through Middlemarch, and the influence of Eliot’s writing on Lee’s work, and Free Food for Millionaires in particular, is clear. If you’re looking for a sprawling contemporary novel with intersecting and heartfelt narratives, this is for you.

I am a great reader and buyer of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, but many of my cultured and sophisticated friends think modern poetry is “difficult” or “obscure”, not to say “incomprehensible”, and consequently don’t read it. So, deciding to proselytise, I give the recalcitrant friend a copy of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, with certain key poems marked. Namely, the title poem, Broadcast, MCMXIV, Sunny Prestatyn, Afternoons, and An Arundel Tomb. More often than not, they’re hooked. Larkin, at his best and most inimitable, speaks to – and for – everyone.

The last book I gave someone was a birthday present that went down so well, I intend to fill a stocking or two with it at Christmas. It was Elizabeth Day’s One of Us, a dark comedy that slickly satirises the lives of a British establishment family. It’s brimming with sharp commentary on class in modern Britain and paints an intimate portrait of the super-privileged’s messy family dynamics. But most importantly, it’s a lot of fun.

On the theory that a gift should raise spirits, I opt for The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono – a naturalist’s quest to improve a strip of land. First published in 1953, it’s a reminder in these torrid times of what really matters in life, and how to make a difference. It can be read in an hour, and few books offer more joy or warmth for your buck.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Erin O White’s debut novel, Like Family, was published in the US last month, and I’ve already given it to two friends and my two sisters. I’m still planning to give it to my neighbour, my oldest friend and my sister-in-law. It’s about three intertwined families in upstate New York, and it’s smart and warm and queer (as in mostly about lesbians) and middle-aged and funny. Admittedly, I’m friends with the author in real life, but writer friendship obligates you to buy just one book; this for me is a case of true literary love. And the beauty of Like Family is that reading it will make you feel like you’re friends with the author, too.

Novelists Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, broadcaster Zeinab Badawi and children’s and young adult author Patrick Ness are among those shortlisted for this year’s Nero awards.

A total of 16 books were shortlisted across the four categories of fiction, debut fiction, nonfiction and children’s fiction. Winners of each category will be announced on 14 January 2025 and receive £5,000, and an overall winner of the Nero Gold prize will be revealed on 5 March and win an additional £30,000.

The awards are run by Caffè Nero, and launched after Costa Coffee abruptly ended its book prizes in June 2022. The prizes are aimed at pointing readers “of all ages and interests in the direction of the most outstanding books and writers of the year”.

Ryan was shortlisted in the fiction category for Heart, Be at Peace, a state-of-the-nation novel set in rural Ireland and told in 21 voices. The book is a follow-up to his debut The Spinning Heart, which won the 2013 Guardian first book award.

Adam S Leslie was shortlisted in the same category for Lost in the Garden, about a surreal expedition through the English countryside. Completing the fiction shortlist are The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya and Levitation for Beginners by Suzannah Dunn.

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Nero book awards shortlist 2024

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All four books shortlisted in the nonfiction category are by debut authors. Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh explores the impact of social media on beauty standards, while Guardian Long Read contributor Sophie Elmhirst’s Maurice and Maralyn tells the story of a British couple who were lost at sea for 117 days in the 1970s after their boat was struck by a whale.

Badawi – a news broadcaster who is also the president of SOAS – was shortlisted for An African History of Africa, while Orlando Whitfield was nominated for All That Glitters, about an art fraudster.

This year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize winner Ferdia Lennon was shortlisted in the Nero debut category with Glorious Exploits, which is set in 412BC Syracuse in the aftermath of Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily.

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Joining Lennon on the debut fiction shortlist is Orlaine McDonald for No Small Thing, Lara Haworth for Monumenta, and short-story writer Barrett for his first novel Wild Houses, which was longlisted for this year’s Booker prize.

Ness made the children’s fiction list for Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, illustrated by Tim Miller. “Ness’s brio turns the school travails of a group of monitor lizards into a bonkers, yet convincing story about difference – and giant killer robots,” wrote reviewer Kitty Empire in the Observer. Bird Boy by Catherine Bruton, How to Survive a Horror Movie by Scarlet Dunmore and The Twelve by Liz Hyder, illustrated by Tom de Freston, were also shortlisted in the children’s category.

To be eligible for the 2024 awards, books had to have been published in English in the UK or Ireland between 1 December 2023 and 30 November 2024, and written by authors resident in the UK or Ireland for the past three years. Judges were asked to choose which books they would highly recommend from hundreds of titles submitted. This year’s judging panels include the writers Patrice Lawrence, Louise Doughty, Kevin Power and Guardian columnist Rhik Samadder.

“There is extraordinary writing talent in the UK and Ireland and our judges have worked tirelessly to find 16 outstanding books based on the quality of their writing and their readability,” said Caffè Nero founder and CEO Gerry Ford. “We received an overwhelming number of entries this year, so I know it was no small feat to choose just 16 for the shortlists.”

Last year, Paul Murray won the inaugural fiction category award and overall Gold prize for his Booker-shortlisted novel The Bee Sting. Meanwhile Michael Magee won the debut fiction category with Close To Home, Fern Brady took the nonfiction prize for Strong Female Character and Beth Lincoln was selected as winner of the children’s fiction category with The Swifts, illustrated by Claire Powell.