How do you pick the right literary gift for your loved one? Matching book to reader is a fine art and buying books for other people remains a tricky business. These are just some of the books that this bookworm would like to find under the Christmas tree.

Choosing favourite books is hard. This is a selection of the books I enjoyed in 2023, not necessarily the “best” ones I read, nor the titles the book critics deemed the year’s most brilliantly written.