There is no better gift than the gift of reading.
More than ever, we need heartwarming and uplifting stories this year. So similar to what was done in December, visit here every Friday and view some great book recommendations to get a jumpstart on your holiday reading:
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers. (Credit: Grove Press)
Stay Another Day by Juno Dawson
The McAllister house on Arboretum Road has seen 120 Christmases since its completion.
This year, FERN is bringing her gorgeous boyfriend home and she wants everything to be perfect.
But her twin brother ROWAN would rather go on the pull than pull crackers with the family.
And their younger sister WILLOW is terrified of Christmas Day.
With FOUR sleeps till Christmas,
THREE secretive siblings,
TWO hot houseguests,
And ONE juicy secret …
This Christmas, there will be some BIG surprises under the tree.
Sometimes at Christmas, you don’t get what you want, you get what you need… (Credit: Quercus Children’s Books)
Snow by John Banville
The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel–the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home
Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.
The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford–flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer–faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.
As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything. (Credit: Hanover Square Press)
Christmas Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
For a decade, while she was Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy gifted her thousands of readers an illustrated poem every Christmas, transporting them in one year to a seventeenth-century festival on the frozen Thames, in another to Western Front to witness the famous 1914 truce, then to a sweet winter’s night in the South of France with Pablo Picasso and his small dog.
Christmas Poems showcases Duffy’s bold and innovative voice, alongside gorgeous artwork from Rob Ryan, David De Las Heras and Lara Hawthorne, amongst others. These ten much-loved poems are gathered together for the first time in this compendium to make a perfect gift for old friends celebrating a decade’s tradition or those experiencing the magic of Duffy’s festive verse for the first time. (Credit: Pan Macmillan)
The Christmas Carrolls by Mel Taylor-Bessent and illustrated by Selom Sunu
Wish it could be Christmas every day? Well, for nine-year-old Holly Carroll and her family, it is! Living her merriest life in a house with year-round fairy lights and Christmas trees, a carol-singing toilet and a diva donkey who thinks he’s a reindeer, home-schooled Holly tries to spread cheer wherever she goes.
But when she goes to a new school with a singing Santa backpack and first day Christmas cards (during a heatwave in September!), she realises not everyone shares her enthusiasm for spreading cheer. In fact, when the neighbours try to remove the Carrolls from the street and Holly discovers a group of children that may not get a Christmas at all, her snowglobe world begins to crack. Is the world’s most Christmassy girl about to lose her Christmas spirit? (Credit: HarperCollins)
cup of tea with that book, please 