Buying books for someone who has read everything is supposed to be impossible. It isn't. It's just that everyone attempts it from the wrong direction — scanning the tables at the front of the shop, looking for the prizewinner they might have missed, which is precisely the shelf a voracious reader cleared out eighteen months ago.
Here's the thing nobody says. They haven't read everything. They've read everything they were shown. Recommendation engines, review pages and three-for-two tables all draw from the same shallow pool, and a heavy reader empties that pool faster than anyone. The gaps are elsewhere entirely: backlist, translation, cult reissues, indie presses, the books that were too odd to market properly. Twelve of them below. Some are difficult. All of them are worth it, and not one is a safe choice.
Books that broke their own format
Riddley Walker — Russell Hoban
Two thousand years after the bombs, in a Kent reduced to mud and iron age technology, a twelve-year-old boy narrates his own story in a language that has decayed along with everything else. Not dialect. A genuinely rebuilt English, phonetic and battered, that you have to learn as you read.
It sounds like homework. It is the opposite — after thirty pages the language stops being an obstacle and becomes the entire experience, because the way Riddley's words have broken tells you exactly what was lost. The travelling Punch and Judy show has become state religion. The nuclear formula survives as a garbled folk legend everyone half-remembers. Hoban does in a made-up vernacular what most novelists can't do with the full dictionary.
Give it to the reader who complains that nothing surprises them any more. This will.
Lanark: A Life in Four Books — Alasdair Gray
A man arrives by train in a city called Unthank where the sun only ever comes up partway, people vanish without comment, and some of them are slowly turning to dragonhide. That's half the book. The other half is a completely straight realist novel about a boy called Duncan Thaw growing up in post-war Glasgow, failing at art school, and being difficult to love.
Gray printed the four books out of order, dropped the epilogue in four chapters before the end, and used it to stage an argument between the author and his own protagonist, complete with an index listing every writer he'd stolen from. In 1981 this was outrageous. It still is. What keeps it from being a stunt is that the Glasgow sections are genuinely devastating on their own terms.
It's the great Scottish novel and half the people who should have read it haven't.
Solenoid — Mircea Cărtărescu
A failed writer teaches Romanian to bored schoolchildren in a grey suburb of Bucharest and keeps a journal about it. Then the journal starts widening. There are machines buried under the city. There are dreams that behave like architecture, and a group of people who gather at night to protest against death itself, on the grounds that somebody ought to.
This is the maximalist novel of the last decade and it takes seven hundred pages to do what it does, which is to make the ordinary business of a wasted life feel like a cosmological event. Sean Cotter's translation is extraordinary. It won the Dublin Literary Award and still almost nobody in these islands has picked it up.
The single biggest swing on this list. Give it to someone with a fortnight off.
Small, strange, perfectly formed
A Month in the Country — J.L. Carr
Summer 1920. Tom Birkin, back from the trenches with a stammer and a facial tic he can't control, arrives in a Yorkshire village to uncover a medieval wall painting hidden under whitewash in the church. He sleeps in the belfry. He works slowly. In the next field another veteran is digging for a grave that may not be there.
Almost nothing happens and it is one of the most complete novels in English. Carr understood that a book about recovery works best if it refuses to say the word — Birkin gets better across a single warm summer and the prose simply gets lighter alongside him, without once announcing itself. The last page does something quietly enormous with the passage of time.
Barely a hundred pages. Nobody has ever regretted being given it.
The Third Policeman — Flann O'Brien
A man murders his neighbour for money, goes looking for the black box the money is in, and ends up at a police barracks in the Irish midlands where the officers are principally concerned with bicycles. Specifically, with the theory that a man who rides a bicycle over rough roads for long enough will gradually exchange atoms with it, until neither is entirely what it was.
Written in 1940, rejected, and left in a drawer until after O'Brien's death in 1966. The footnotes alone — an ongoing scholarly commentary on a completely invented philosopher called de Selby, who believed night was an accumulation of black air — would carry a lesser novel. It is very funny and quietly terrifying in a way that only becomes clear on the last page.
Say nothing about the ending. Just hand it over.
Pond — Claire-Louise Bennett
Twenty pieces, some story-length and some a paragraph, narrated by a woman living alone in a rented cottage on the edge of a village on the Irish coast. The subjects include a broken oven knob, the correct way to eat porridge, a sign somebody has placed beside a pond identifying it as a pond, and a cow.
That description makes it sound twee, and it is the least twee book imaginable. Bennett writes consciousness at very close range — the way a mind actually moves when there is nobody else in the house to organise it for. The sentences are long, elastic and extremely controlled, and the effect is unnerving rather than cosy. It made her reputation immediately and then she declined to write anything remotely like it again.
For the reader who says they want something with no plot and means it.
Genre books wearing literary clothes
Under the Skin — Michel Faber
Isserley drives the A9 through the Scottish Highlands, day after day, picking up male hitchhikers. She's selective. She wants them big, muscular, and — crucially — unlikely to be missed. She is also, it becomes clear early on, not remotely what she appears to be.
Everybody has seen the Jonathan Glazer film. Almost nobody has read the book, and the book is a different animal entirely: colder, angrier, and far more interested in Isserley herself, who has been surgically remade for this work and is in constant physical pain because of it. It's a novel about factory farming, class, and what a body will endure to keep a job. The Highlands have rarely been written this well.
Deeply unpleasant in the best way. An outstanding present.
The Soul Bank — Adam Eccles
Andy Clarke is a hardware consultant who spends one entirely forgettable night in a business hotel near an industrial estate in the Home Counties. He drives home the next day. Nothing happened. Except he can't sleep now, there's a tune in his head he can't place, and he has started dreaming — vividly, nightly, continuously — about a woman he has never met.
What makes it belong on a list like this is its refusal to resolve into a genre. The dreams could be a breakdown. They could be something else. Andy's relationship is quietly disintegrating around the edges of the question, and the novel is far more interested in what it does to him to be certain of something he cannot possibly know than in explaining itself. It sits closer to the unsettled register of early McEwan than to anything with a twist on the cover.
For the reader who liked The Midnight Library but wanted it to be darker and to trust them more.
The Employees — Olga Ravn
The entire novel is a set of numbered witness statements collected from the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, some of them human and some of them made. They have brought several objects aboard from the planet they're orbiting. Nobody can say what the objects are. Everybody has become attached to them, and the statements start to curdle.
It's a hundred and twenty pages of HR paperwork and it's one of the saddest things I've read. Ravn uses the flattest possible form — the workplace testimony, the anonymised report — to ask what it is that humans actually have, and whether wanting it is the same as having it. Martin Aitken's translation keeps every sentence clipped and slightly wrong in the right way.
Shortlisted for the International Booker. Still shelved as science fiction, which is nobody's fault and everybody's loss.
Gnomon — Nick Harkaway
Near-future Britain has achieved total transparency. The System sees everything, and when a dissident novelist dies during a routine machine interrogation, Inspector Mielikki Neith is sent into the recording of her mind to find out why. Inside it she finds four other people who have no business being there at all.
Harkaway builds the whole thing like a lock. Every nested narrative — the banker, the alchemist, the painter — appears to be a digression and is in fact load-bearing, and the pleasure of the last two hundred pages is watching a structure you assumed was showing off turn out to have been an argument the entire time. It's a surveillance novel that actually understands what surveillance does to the surveilled, which is rarer than it should be.
Enormous, demanding, entirely fair with the reader. Give it to someone who thinks in systems.
Music, and the people it wrecks
This Is Memorial Device — David Keenan
An oral history of a post-punk band from Airdrie who were the greatest group in the world for about eighteen months in the early eighties and were heard by roughly four hundred people. The band did not exist. Keenan wrote every interview, every contradictory account, every score-settling recollection from every bass player who was briefly in the line-up, and appended an index so you can look them all up.
The joke is that it reads more like a real scene than most actual music writing does, because Keenan understands the thing rock biographies always miss: that everybody remembers it differently, everybody is lying slightly, and the myth is doing more work than the music ever did. It's also very funny about Lanarkshire.
The best novel about being in a band that nobody's heard of. Which is most bands.
Cold Heart October — Adam Eccles
In June 1994 a nineteen-year-old from the west of Ireland stepped in for a cancelled support act at Whelan's in Dublin, opened his mouth, and did something to that room that thirty years of people have never managed to explain. Not talent. Something else. Mick Grady's voice changed the people who heard it, and the effect has never been accounted for by anyone, including him.
Three decades on he's holed up in his late mother's cottage in a village in County Clare, unable to write anything worth keeping since the band's songwriter died in 2012. Then Siofra Wilde arrives — a paranormal investigator with a YouTube channel and a career in freefall, who has watched a phone video of Mick singing at a fiftieth birthday party in a pub and has recognised the one story that could save her. She wants to document the voice. He wants to be left alone.
It's literary fiction with exactly one impossible thing in it, and it never explains that thing, because explaining it would be the wrong book. What it's actually about is grief, guilt, the west of Ireland, and what a person owes to the talent they've been sitting on. If the reader you're buying for loved Daisy Jones and wanted it to hurt more, this is the one.
Why this list, why now
The hard-to-buy-for reader is a myth built on a category error. What they're hard to buy for is the next obvious book, and the next obvious book is the one problem the entire publishing and retail apparatus is already solving on their behalf, quite efficiently, without your help.
So stop competing with it. The reader who has read everything has an enormous appetite and a very narrow supply line, and every book above sits outside it — out of print for a decade, translated late, published by someone with four staff, or simply too strange to put a sticker on. Getting one of these right is worth ten safe hardbacks, and getting one wrong is still more interesting than getting a safe one right.
Buy the odd one. They've got enough prizewinners.
FAQ
What do you buy for someone who has read everything?
Something that was never on the table by the till. The reader who has read everything has read everything that got marketed at them, which is a much smaller category than it feels. Backlist, translated fiction, cult reissues and indie novels are where the gaps are. Solenoid is the boldest single swing on this list.
Isn't it risky giving a difficult book as a present?
It's riskier giving a safe one. A voracious reader has been handed the same six prizewinners by six different people and has learned to say thank you in a particular voice. A strange book at least means something. If it doesn't land, they'll still remember that somebody tried.
Which of these is the most readable?
A Month in the Country — it's barely a hundred pages, entirely gentle, and one of the best English novels of the last fifty years. Nobody has ever disliked it. If you want something contemporary and equally easy to fall into, Cold Heart October reads fast and hits hard.
Are indie novels really a good gift for a serious reader?
They're the only category the algorithm genuinely can't reach. A serious reader has seen every front table in the country and none of them carry indie fiction. The Soul Bank and Cold Heart October are both books they'd have no way of stumbling across, which is the entire point of a present.
What if they've already read some of these?
Then you've found a genuinely well-read person and you should ask them what they'd put on the list instead. That conversation is worth more than the book. But the honest odds are they've read one, maybe two, and heard of a third.