These are the books we like to give as gifts... and the best we've ever received
In the mid ’80s, my flatmate gave me Patrick Süskind’s Perfume for Christmas. I lost a few days once I’d turned that first page. Suddenly smell meant everything. I got it recently for my husband but actually started to re-read it myself and the same thing happened. Hooked!
Even the Mountains by Seán O Connor is a stunningly simple account of the five years himself and his wife Junko spent in a Japanese village. Every short section of prose is followed by a handful of haiku poems that are delicious morsels of beauty and truth.
Carrie Crowley stars in the TV series Smother
One Christmas, when I was very young, I received Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, a beautiful and at times breathtaking coming-of-age story that seemed to contain all the world's small magic. Bradbury's descriptions and the melodies in his sentences still hold me spellbound.
I've gifted Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove more than once. Detailing a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, the 900-page western is invariably met with uncertainty, but this is a transcendent work, a novel for all time, genre be damned – a true masterpiece of narrative and characterisation. Everyone who knows this book wishes they could read it again for the first time.
Billy O’Callaghan’s novel Life Sentences is published by Jonathan Cape.
My wife gave me Hamnet by Maggie Farrell. It’s a novel about William Shakespeare’s two children. One of them dies. The first page is a spoiler so don’t read the first page! It’s a remarkable story. It absolutely transports you to that time. She writes senses, textures and colours so well. It’s written so well you can almost smell it.
Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about this African-American woman who died in 1951. Unbeknownst to her, medical scientists in Johns Hopkins Hospital took her cells. For years, these cells – known as HeLa cells – were continually divided and generated in a lab, and later posted to other research facilities. Until relatively recently, if you were using a medical drug, chances are it was developed on cell cultures from this woman. It’s a mind-boggling story.
Neil Delamere is on Instagram: @neildelamerecomedy.
The best book I’ve received as a gift was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, one of the beautiful Folio Society hardbacks, a couple of years ago. It’s enchanting, exactly the kind of book you should have in heirloom hardback, equally comforting and challenging, and much funnier than you’d think.
I’ve given Bill Bryon’s A Short History of Nearly Everything a number of times as a present, both the original and the abridged kids’ version. A mighty, accessible, warm, curious work. God, I wish I’d had a copy when I was struggling with Leaving Cert chemistry.
Lisa McInerney’s The Rules of Revelation will be published by John Murray in May.
Somebody sent me Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis. He’s a Jungian psychologist. The book is aimed at people in a career that’s not as fulfilling as it was, those experiencing family transitions that raise issues about aging and mortality. My parents had died; my two daughters were heading into their early 20s. The book was a prompt. It put a sense of unease I was feeling into context and helped me do something with it rather than carrying on feeling uneasy.
The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart is ideal for someone having difficulties in life. It covers aspects like self-image, motivation, anxiety, relationships, love and loss. For each topic, there’s a poem – from poets like John Keats to Philip Larkin – and Sieghart has written about the poem and how it’s helped him.
A few years ago, my daughter Coral gave me a lovely edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s the last book I read to her in bed when she got too old for that. We actually stopped reading – she had it bookmarked – in the middle of the book where Jim Hawkins stops telling the tale. The narrative passes to somebody else. She didn’t like that change of narrator. The book takes a temporary dive. It was a lesson to me.
The selected poems of Paula Meehan, As If By Magic, has just come out. Paula is that thing, which I wasn’t – she’s a natural-born, miraculous poet. I’d be proud to give her collection as a gift. Also to give the impression that some of her magic would rub off on the person I’m giving the gift to – and indeed on myself for giving the gift!
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is timeless. You can read it at different stages in your life and it has different relevance at different times. It’s all about stepping outside society’s norms and finding meaning, connection and belonging in your life. I’ve probably received it three or four times and read it again and again.
Caitlin Moran’s Moranifesto is all about modern, everyday topical issues, mixed with her sense of humour. You end up educating yourself about our times, but it’s not a heavy read and it’s really funny. It's a book to put in the bathroom, pick up and read little chapters at a time.
Lacy Moore stars in Age of the Living Dead on Amazon Prime.
The first birthday present I remember getting was The Greedy Rabbit and Other Stories by Enid Blyton. I must have been five. I read it to bits. I still have it. I wrote my name proudly on it in pencil: “Oliver Callan owns this book OK”. I was obviously jealously guarding it! It has stories in like The Shivery Snowman, The Bad-Tempered Doll and The Little Horse Tricycle, which sounds trippy.
The book I’ve given out the most is John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies. It has one of the great opening sequences: “Long before we had discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Fr James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
My parents gave me The Assassin’s Cloak for Christmas one year. It’s diary entries from diarists like Samuel Pepys, Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft. It gave me a sense of day-to-day life in different times and the humdrum ordinariness of daily life for people we venerate, talking about their washing, dinner, going to the club, sanitary conditions, or outdated thinking on women or slavery. I still dip into it.
I always loved The Witches by Roald Dahl although I realise he’s a problematic figure. It’s a book that I like to give to children in my life like nieces and nephews because it doesn’t treat children like idiots – as though they haven’t got a brain or can’t understand darkness, shade, light and morality. I first read it when I was about seven.
My dad gave me The Secret by Rhonda Byrne years ago when I came out of a relationship breakup. I had come to a standstill for a few months, doubting everything, including my music. The book was amazing about the law of attraction: the energy you put out to the world comes back to you. Now if I get a few knocks, personally or in the industry, or some bad comments on social media, I find myself going back to this book so I can get back into a positive frame of mind.
The Art of Happiness is based on interviews with the Dalai Lama by a journalist, Howard C. Cutler. Some of the answers the Dalai Lama gives are things you wouldn’t think of in everyday life. Sometimes we overcomplicate our lives. It’s not all about materialism and making money. A simplistic set of life rules can bring you happiness.
My godmother always gave me books every Christmas. I remember when she got me The Tales of Mother Goose. I was hardly even going to school. It ignited my love of reading. Going to primary school, I used to be caught at night under the bedsheets with a flashlight, trying to read all night!
Nine times out of 10 if I’m buying someone a gift – if it’s for a meaningful reason – I tend to buy them a book of poetry because poems can be very comforting. If you’ve gone through a bad time, it’s nice to read an uplifting poet. If I had to pick a collection, it would be W.B. Yeats.
I recently received Harry Crosbie’s Undernose Farm – which has an unusual title – in which he tells all these yarns about old Dublin. He does it in a very original style.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a magnificent book. It tells us a great deal about how crime and punishment fit into the idea of democracy. I’m planning to give the book to some of my children. Before I die, I’m desperately trying to educate them!
