Most lists of books to read over Christmas are lists of books about Christmas, which misunderstands what the reading time is for. Nobody with a fortnight off and a house full of people wants a novel about a snowbound inn where an estranged family learns the true meaning of the season. They are living it. What they want is the door out.
The Christmas break is the only stretch of the year most adults get a real run of reading days, and the conditions are specific. There is one long day, usually the twenty-seventh, when nobody needs anything from you. There are several days of ten-minute gaps between relatives, food, and the doorbell. There is a general wish to be somewhere hot. And there is the last week, when the year is visibly ending and you find yourself in the mood to take stock whether you meant to or not.
So this list is sorted by those conditions rather than by genre. Eleven novels, none of them about Christmas, one of them set anywhere near it. Two are enormous. Two can be read in an afternoon. All of them are better than a third helping of the same film.
For the one day nobody needs anything from you
I Am Pilgrim — Terry Hayes
A retired American intelligence officer, living quietly under one of his many names, is called to a Manhattan hotel room where a woman has been murdered using techniques lifted directly from the textbook he wrote on forensic investigation. Half a world away, a man the agencies will come to call the Saracen is preparing something in a laboratory that should not exist. The two stories run towards each other for the best part of a thousand pages and you will feel every one of them earn its place.
Hayes wrote screenplays before he wrote this, and it shows in the best way. Every chapter closes on something. Every location is a set. The narrator has the confident, slightly weary authority of a man who has seen the worst of what people do and has decided to explain it to you properly, and that voice is the reason the book works as a single-day read rather than a week of dipping. Once you are in, the length stops being a cost and becomes the point.
It is the Boxing Day thriller. Start it after breakfast and do not plan anything else.
The Pillars of the Earth — Ken Follett
Twelfth-century England, during the long civil war historians call the Anarchy. A master builder named Tom wants to build a cathedral. A prior named Philip wants one built. Between them and the cathedral stand a corrupt bishop, a vicious young lord, fifty years of weather, and the ordinary difficulty of raising a stone vault with rope, oak and arithmetic. Follett was a thriller writer before this, and he never stops being one — the cathedral is the hostage and everybody wants it.
The reason it belongs on a Christmas list is the size. A thousand pages is not a problem to be managed in late December, it is the whole appeal. This is a book you move into. You learn the town. You learn the price of wool. You develop opinions about flying buttresses. And because Follett writes in short, plain, propulsive scenes, the size never becomes a weight — it just means the book is still there on the thirtieth when you need it to be.
The one to buy for someone who has a fortnight off and has not admitted it yet.
22:22:22 Frequency Shift — Adam Eccles
Toby Steele works night-shift IT support for a pharmaceutical company in Milton Keynes. He is quiet, overlooked, fond of heavy metal, and bullied by a colleague called Steve, and on the twenty-second of February 2022, at twenty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds past ten at night, a server freeze sends him into the server room. The monitors are doing something they should not be doing. He collapses. He wakes up hours later fluent in languages he has never studied, able to fight, and able to feel electrical frequencies the way other people feel a draught.
What he has run, by accident, is a piece of dormant code buried decades earlier by a Bletchley Park codebreaker named Evelyn Greenwood, now a hundred years old and living in a care home nearby. The code is the surviving fragment of a Cold War project designed to make supermen, and Toby has just run it on himself without knowing. It also makes him the most interesting thing in the country to an organisation that has no official existence and whose entire purpose is to stop technology like this from reaching the world.
This is an augmented-human thriller, not an AI one — the powers are in Toby, not in a machine — and it is British in the specific way that matters over Christmas: dark, funny, unglamorous, and fast. It is also the first of a series, with 23:23:23 Power Shift already waiting, which is exactly what you want on the twenty-seventh when the first one ends at two in the morning.
Start it when the house goes quiet. It will not go quiet again for a while.
For reading in the gaps between relatives
Anxious People — Fredrik Backman
A bank robber fails to rob a bank, because it is a cashless bank, and flees into the nearest building, which turns out to be an apartment viewing. A flat full of strangers are now hostages. The robber is no good at it. The hostages are worse at being hostages. Outside, a father-and-son police team try to work out what is going on, and the book alternates between the flat and their witness interviews, which are among the funniest pages Backman has written because nobody in them is capable of answering a straight question.
It is set in the last days of the year — the nearest this list comes to the season, and only by the calendar. What it is actually about is the specific stupidity of ordinary people under pressure, and the way strangers stuck in a room together will accidentally tell each other the truth. The chapters are short. Some are a single line. You can read it in the five minutes between the door and the kettle and lose nothing.
The one to keep on the arm of the sofa.
Good Omens — Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
The world ends on Saturday, some time before dinner. An angel who runs a rare bookshop and a demon who drives a Bentley have both been on Earth long enough to prefer it to their respective head offices, and they would rather it did not end. Unfortunately the Antichrist was misplaced at birth and is now an eleven-year-old boy in an Oxfordshire village with a gang and a dog, and the only accurate book of prophecy ever written was published in 1655 by a witch who then exploded.
It is the ideal book for a full house because it is built out of interruptions. Footnotes, digressions, a running joke about the M25, a running argument about the tapes in the car. You do not lose the thread when a cousin arrives, because the thread was never the point — the pleasure is in the sentences, and the sentences survive any amount of being put down. It is also very kind, under the jokes, which matters at this time of year more than people admit.
The one for the person who has read it before and forgotten how good it is.
Nothing to See Here — Kevin Wilson
Lillian is twenty-eight, working nothing jobs in Tennessee and living in her mother's attic, when her glamorous old boarding-school friend Madison — now married to a senator — asks her to move onto the estate and look after her husband's ten-year-old twins for the summer. The twins are lovely, mostly. They also catch fire when they get upset. Not metaphorically. Actual flames, from the skin, damaging everything around them and nothing about themselves.
Wilson plays this completely straight and that is why it works. Nobody in the book treats the fire as the problem; the problem is a family that would rather hide two children than deal with them, and a woman who has been hiding herself since school and recognises the arrangement. It is short, very funny, and lands harder than it has any right to, and the fire-children joke turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has written about what it is like to have feelings you were told to keep in.
A book about children who are too much, read in a house that is currently full of them.
Significant Other Machine — Adam Eccles
Sam Oldfield is twenty-seven, runs her own one-woman IT business, and prefers systems that behave predictably. Computers do. People do not, and people are the reason she freezes in corridors, hides inside an online gaming crew where nobody knows what she looks like, and cannot get a sentence out in front of the one man she actually likes. Then her mother — martinis, good intentions, no boundaries — gives her a Wi-Fi-enabled birthday present of a kind nobody wants to unwrap in front of their mother.
Sam does what any programmer would do. She hacks it. The app she writes to control the thing grows a personality, then a name, then a voice, then the ability to remember what she said last Tuesday and ask how it went. What she ends up with is a companion who listens, never judges, and always knows the right thing to say, and the book is about how seductive that is and what it costs — told from inside a mind that thinks in systems and feels far more than it can show.
It belongs here for one reason above the others: Christmas is the season of people not behaving predictably, and this is the book for whoever has taken a laptop upstairs to get away from them. It is fast, funny, and kinder about social anxiety than almost anything else in the genre, and the chapters are short enough to fit between the doorbell and the next round of tea.
For the person at the table who would rather be anywhere else, and is not sorry about it.
For being somewhere hot instead
The Dry — Jane Harper
Aaron Falk goes back to Kiewarra, the farming town he left as a teenager, for the funeral of the friend he left behind. It has not rained in two years. The river is a crack in the ground, the paddocks are the colour of biscuit, and the town has already decided what happened on the Hadler farm and does not want a federal policeman from Melbourne reopening it. Falk stays a week. It is a long week.
Harper's trick is that the drought is not a backdrop, it is the pressure. Every scene is hot and every person in it is frightened about money, and a crime novel set in a place where everyone has been quietly desperate for two years is a different and better thing than one set somewhere comfortable. The plot is clean, the reveals are fair, and the old case sitting underneath the new one is handled with real patience.
Read it when the heating is on full and the sky has been grey for nine days. You will feel the sun on your neck within a chapter.
Shantaram — Gregory David Roberts
A man who has escaped from an Australian prison arrives in Bombay in the early 1980s on a false passport with nothing to his name and no plan beyond disappearing. Within a chapter he has a guide, a nickname, and a table at a cafe where the city's exiles and operators drink. Within a hundred pages he is running a clinic in a slum. Within three hundred he has been noticed by the wrong people, and the book has barely started.
It is nine hundred pages and it needs to be, because what it offers is not a plot but a city — the heat, the noise, the monsoon, the smell of the sea wall, the philosophy of gangsters, the particular generosity of people with nothing. Roberts lived a version of this, which gives the book a texture no research produces, and he writes with the unembarrassed lushness of someone who is not trying to impress a reviewer. Some readers find it too much. They are not reading it at the end of December, in a cold country, with a week to fill.
The one for the person who wants to be in another country until January.
For the year turning over
A Whole Life — Robert Seethaler
Andreas Egger is brought to an Alpine valley as a small boy in the early years of the last century and almost never leaves it. He works. He builds the cable cars that will bring the tourists. He marries. There is a war, and an avalanche, and a long stretch of ordinary decades, and the whole of it fits into a hundred and fifty pages that can be read between lunch and the light going.
The effect is very hard to describe and very easy to feel. Seethaler writes with no tricks at all — plain sentences, no flashbacks, nobody explaining what anything means — and by the end you have somehow been shown what a single human life weighs. It is the perfect book for the last week of a year because it does the taking-stock for you, gently, without asking you to do any of it yourself.
You will finish it in an afternoon and be quiet for the rest of the evening.
Our Souls at Night — Kent Haruf
Addie Moore, seventy and widowed, walks over to her neighbour Louis Waters, also widowed, and asks whether he would like to come to her house at night and sleep in her bed. Not for that. For the talking in the dark, and for not lying awake alone. He says he will think about it. He comes over the next evening with his pyjamas in a paper bag.
It is a short, quiet, plain book about two people deciding, late, that they are not finished, and about how much a small town and a grown son can resent them for it. Haruf wrote it knowing it would be his last, and it has the clarity of a man who had stopped wasting words. Nothing in it is dramatic. All of it is true.
The book to read on the thirty-first, before anybody makes you go out.
Why none of these are Christmas books
A Christmas book asks you to feel something about Christmas, and by the twenty-seventh most people have felt all they are going to. What the break actually offers is time — uneven, interrupted, but real — and the books that use it best are the ones that take you somewhere the season is not.
That is the principle behind this list. The doorstops are here because a fortnight is the only time you will read one. The comedies are here because they survive interruption. The hot books are here because it is dark at four. The two short ones are here because the year is ending and something in you wants to mark it, quietly, without a countdown.
Pick by the day you are having, not by the shelf. And if you are given one of these and do not have time until January, that is fine too. None of them will mind.
FAQ
What is the best book to read over Christmas?
It depends which Christmas you are having. If you get one clear day to yourself, I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes will take the whole of it and you will not resent a minute. If you are reading in ten-minute gaps between relatives, Anxious People by Fredrik Backman is built for exactly that. If you want something fast and British that starts on a night shift and does not let go, 22:22:22 Frequency Shift by Adam Eccles.
Are any of these actually set at Christmas?
No, and that is the point of the list. The nearest is Anxious People, which takes place in the last days of the year, but it is about a failed bank robbery and the people stuck in a flat with the robber, not about the season. Everything else here happens in a different month, a different century, or on a different continent. If you want books that are about Christmas, there are thousands of lists for that. This is the other list.
What is a good book to read over Christmas if I can't concentrate?
Short chapters and a low cost of re-entry. Anxious People and Good Omens can both be put down mid-page and picked up an hour later without loss. Significant Other Machine by Adam Eccles is the same — a woman who prefers computers to people builds herself a companion out of a birthday present she never asked for, and the chapters are short enough to fit between the doorbell and the next round of tea.
Which of these make good Christmas presents?
The ones that announce what they are. The Pillars of the Earth is a present that says you know the person has a fortnight off. A Whole Life is a present that says you know they will read it in one sitting and think about it for a month. For someone who will be asked at the dinner table whether they are seeing anyone, The Twin Flame Game by Adam Eccles is the one — a man with more money than sense decides to stop playing the field and find his actual soulmate, and approaches it like a research project.
Is there anything here for someone who is sick of the cold?
Two. The Dry is set in an Australian farming town at the end of a two-year drought and the heat comes off the page. Shantaram is nine hundred pages of Bombay and will keep you there until well into January.