20 Books to Gift Anyone, Sorted by Who You Are Buying For

Christopher is fifteen, very good at maths, and he finds his neighbour's dog dead on the lawn with a garden fork through it. He decides to investigate, writes the investigation down as a book, and numbers his chapters in prime numbers because ordinary numbers bore him. What begins as a small mystery about a dog opens into a much larger one about his own family. The voice is the whole trick: flat, literal, accidentally funny, and it pulls you forward faster than you planned. The book never names a diagnosis for Christopher, and Haddon has said he did not set out to write about autism.

Rabih and Kirsten meet in Edinburgh, fall in love, marry, and then the novel does the thing romance almost never does: it keeps going. Arguments about dishwashers, an affair, therapy, small children, the slow discovery that the person you married carries an entire interior life you were never consulted about. Every few pages de Botton stops the story to explain what just happened between them, which sounds unbearable on paper and turns out to be the best part of the book. It reads like a novel with subtitles running underneath.

In 1903 a nineteen year old military cadet sent his poems to Rilke and asked whether they were any good. Rilke wrote back ten times across five years and never really answered the question. He told the young man to stop asking other people, to go into himself and find out whether he would die if he were forbidden to write, and to be patient with everything in his heart that had not been settled yet. The letters cover solitude, doubt, sex, work and waiting. The whole thing runs under a hundred pages.

Phil Knight borrows money from his father, flies to Japan, talks his way into importing running shoes, and sells them from the boot of his car at track meets. The company that eventually becomes Nike spends most of this book nearly dying: no cash, a bank that keeps dropping them, a supplier turning hostile overnight. Knight writes it as a memoir about being frightened for two decades rather than as a set of business lessons, and he is unusually honest about how much came down to luck, timing and refusing to stop.

Charlie writes letters to a stranger through his first year of high school. He is fifteen, painfully observant, recently lost a friend, and gets adopted by two older kids who take him to parties and hand him books and mixtapes. Very little happens by the standards of plot, and then a great deal happens at once near the end. What teenagers respond to is that Charlie never performs being fine. Adult readers often find it slight. Fifteen year olds tend to hold on to it well into their twenties.

Matilda teaches herself to read at four, walks to the library alone, and gets through the adult shelf while her parents shout at the television behind her. School turns out to be worse than home: the headmistress swings children by their pigtails and calls it discipline. So Matilda finds a way to fight back, using something she should not be able to do. Quentin Blake's drawings are half the pleasure, all scratchy lines and enormous grown-ups looming over small people, which is exactly why the hardback matters more here than usual.

A mouse walks through a wood where a fox, an owl and a snake all fancy him for lunch, so he invents a monster with terrible tusks and claws to frighten them off, and then walks straight into the monster he made up. It rhymes, it repeats, and the repetition is engineered so a two year old can finish your lines before you get to them. Axel Scheffler's pictures earn the hardback. Think of it as a picture book for the child and a piece of survival equipment for the parent.

Monika Halan writes for the Indian salary earner, which is rarer than it should be. The book builds one system rather than a pile of tips: separate accounts for spending, saving and investing, an emergency cushion before anything clever, term insurance kept well away from investment products, then mutual funds for the long haul. She is direct about the schemes sold to us by relatives and bank staff, and explains why a policy promising protection and returns together usually delivers neither. Calm, specific to Indian rules, and free of hustle talk.

Rachel is seven months pregnant when she works out that her husband is in love with somebody else, and she tells the story as a comedy because the alternative is not available to her. Recipes appear inside the chapters, mashed potatoes and a key lime pie that eventually gets used for something other than eating. The book runs under two hundred pages and it moves. The jokes are load bearing: each one is doing the work of holding a woman together while her marriage collapses in front of an audience.

Elizabeth Gilbert's argument is that ideas drift around looking for a person willing to do the work, and if you keep refusing, they go and find somebody else. Around that she builds a case for making things without demanding that the making pay your rent, which is the most useful part of the book. She kept a day job long after she could have walked away from it. Some chapters are pep talk and you can feel it. Others are plain good sense about fear, permission, and actually finishing what you start.

Burkeman opens with arithmetic: a person who reaches eighty gets roughly four thousand weeks. His case is that every productivity system fails for the same reason, because each one promises that you will eventually be on top of everything, and you never will be, since the supply of worthwhile things is endless. So the real work is deciding what to neglect on purpose. It is a time management book that asks you to give up on time management, written with dry humour and not a single morning routine in it.

A boy meets a mole who loves cake, a wary fox and a horse, and the four of them walk together while asking each other small questions that turn out to be very large ones. The whole book is handwritten in ink and watercolour, so it feels like a friend's notebook rather than a product from a publishing plan. There is no plot to speak of. You get through it in twenty minutes, leave it on a table, and then watch other people pick it up. One exchange about the bravest thing a person can say is the line everybody quotes.

Narayan built a small south Indian town called Malgudi and then spent a career filling it with people. A talkative astrologer who reads palms under a flickering lamp. A postman who cannot bring himself to deliver bad news to a family with a wedding coming. A blind beggar whose dog decides his fate. Each story runs a few pages, ends without a moral attached, and leaves you feeling you have met somebody. The prose is so plain it looks easy, which it is not, and nothing in it needs a footnote or a phone.

Pattanaik retells the Mahabharata in short chapters of a few pages each, with his own line drawings on almost every spread and boxed notes at the end of every section explaining how the story shifts across regions and centuries. Those boxes are the reason to buy it. The version your grandmother tells is not the version told in Tamil Nadu, or in Java, and he lays both out without ruling on which one is correct. For anyone who found a full translation impossible, this is the way in.

Nine stories about Indians in America and Americans in India, most of them really about the small distances inside a marriage. A couple who lost a baby agree to tell each other one true thing per night during a week of scheduled power cuts. A Bengali woman in Boston cannot drive and cannot find the fish she wants. A tour guide who also translates patients' symptoms for a doctor gets mistaken by a tourist for something far more interesting than he is. Lahiri writes plainly and leaves the ache in the gaps between sentences.

Guha writes the social history of Indian cricket, which turns out to be a history of caste, empire and religion with a scorecard attached to it. The strongest section follows Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit spin bowler in the early 1900s who was good enough to be picked for every side and never allowed to lead one, and whose life runs alongside Ambedkar's. Then come the communal tournaments in Bombay, where the teams were literally Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Europeans. It is long, properly researched, and it changes how you watch a match.

Nosrat's argument is that nearly all good cooking comes down to four things, and that recipes train obedience rather than judgment. So the first half explains what salt does to protein, why fat carries flavour, what acid corrects, and how heat actually behaves, and the second half hands you recipes to practise on. Wendy MacNaughton's drawings run through the whole thing and turn it into a book people leave out on the counter. Afterwards you start tasting and adjusting instead of measuring and hoping.

Frater flies to Kerala in May to meet the monsoon on the day it makes landfall, then chases it north for weeks through Goa, Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta, before ending in the Meghalaya hills at Cherrapunji, where the rain is heaviest and the permission to visit is hardest to get. Along the way he collects bus drivers, weathermen, hoteliers and an entire country's worth of rain talk. He listens well and he is funny on the page, and the book carries the mood of the first hour of a downpour.

Marco Polo sits with an ageing Kublai Khan and describes the cities of an empire the emperor will never finish seeing. Fifty-five of them, roughly a page each. A city built on stilts above a void. A city where the dead outnumber the living. A city that keeps repeating itself with tiny changes. There is no plot, and slowly you understand that Polo may be describing one city over and over from different angles. It is a book to read three pages at a time, and it fits in a coat pocket.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a small boy who has arrived from an asteroid with three volcanoes and one very difficult rose. The boy describes the grown-ups he met on other planets on the way: a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he believes he owns, a lamplighter following an order nobody has updated in years. Then a fox explains what it costs to let yourself become attached to something. It takes an hour, and the author's own watercolours are printed inside.