Unwrap a Prize Winner: Award-Winning Books to Give This Christmas

Why it’s here: The top-ranked novel of the decade in our tally, with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. Percival Everett retells Huckleberry Finn from the side of the enslaved Jim - who turns out to be a sharp, secretly literate man playing the role white people expect of him. Funny, furious and moving, it turns a classic everyone thinks they know on its head.

Perfect for: Anyone who loves a big, talked-about novel, and everyone who read Huck Finn at school.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Women's Prize and shortlisted for the Booker. In 1961, Isabel lives alone in her late mother's house in the Dutch countryside, ruled by routine - until her brother leaves his new girlfriend Eva with her for the season. Eva is everything Isabel is not: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. Then spoons and bowls start to go missing. Tense, sensual and atmospheric.

Perfect for: Readers who like slow-burning tension and atmospheric historical fiction.

Why it’s here: The first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize. Banu Mushtaq's twelve stories, written in Kannada over three decades, follow women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India - sparky children, audacious grandmothers, hapless husbands and, above all, mothers holding everything together. Warm, sharp and often laugh-out-loud funny, with real anger underneath.

Perfect for: Busy readers who want something brilliant they can read one story at a time.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Anthony Award and a finalist for the Edgar. In August 1975, thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears from her wealthy family's summer camp in the Adirondacks - fourteen years after her older brother vanished from the same woods. Liz Moore moves between campers, counsellors, investigators and the Van Laars themselves, building a mystery about class, family secrets and who gets believed.

Perfect for: Fans of literary crime with multiple timelines and family secrets; a great book club pick, too.

Why it’s here: Winner of the 2026 CWA Gold Dagger, Britain's top prize for a crime novel. Isabel and Edward meet as teenagers and build a life together - until a stranger walks into their home and tears it apart. Abigail Dean follows what comes after: a marriage under unbearable pressure, the stories two people tell themselves about love, and how much that love can bear.

Perfect for: Readers who like psychological suspense with real emotional depth - and fans of Abigail Dean's Girl A.

Why it’s here: Robert Crais won the Edgar Award for Best Novel with this cold case. Ten years after her father vanished from a small town near Los Angeles, Traci Beller - now a social media star with millions of followers - hires private investigator Elvis Cole to find out what happened. With his ex-Marine partner Joe Pike, Cole soon learns the case is far darker and more dangerous than it looks. Twisty, fast and deeply satisfying.

Perfect for: Classic private-eye fans - and a perfect way into a series with plenty of books to give next year.

Why it’s here: Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. Decades from now, two women sit by a campfire and look back: Lucy, an activist who grew up sharing her grandmother's love of birds, and Hester, a filmmaker who found her purpose in a wolf dog from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Across fifty years of protests, family rifts and loss, their lives lead to the fight to bring wolves back to Britain - a hopeful, grounded climate novel.

Perfect for: Readers who love nature writing and near-future stories that feel close to home.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Locus Award and shortlisted for both the Hugo and the Nebula. Zelu, a disabled writer, loses her university job and has her latest novel rejected on the same day - so she writes something completely different: a science fiction story about androids after the end of humanity. It changes her life. Nnedi Okorafor tells both stories side by side, until the lines between fiction and reality start to blur.

Perfect for: Readers who like books about books, and anyone curious about AI stories with real heart.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Hugo, the Arthur C. Clarke and the Locus Award. A domestic robot valet murders its owner after a strange glitch in its programming - and then discovers it can also do something new: run away. Its journey through a collapsing world full of robots that have lost their purpose is a sly, very funny satire about work, usefulness and what it means to serve.

Perfect for: Anyone who enjoys dry humour, Douglas Adams or a robot with excellent manners.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award, and a finalist for the Edgar. At the edge of an empire where the blood of giant leviathans causes strange magical changes, an imperial officer is found dead - killed by a tree that erupted from his body. Investigating is Ana Dolabra, a blindfolded, wildly eccentric genius, with her new assistant Din, who has been altered to remember everything he sees. A proper whodunit in a strikingly original world.

Perfect for: Fantasy readers and mystery lovers alike - it works for both.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Hugo and the Locus Award. Sir Una Everlasting was her nation's greatest hero: the orphan girl who became a knight and died for queen and country. Centuries later, struggling scholar Owen Mallory falls in love with her legend - and is sent back in time to make sure she plays her part, even if it breaks his heart. A romantic, time-twisting story about love, history and the legends nations tell about themselves.

Perfect for: Readers who want romance, time travel and a story about how legends get made.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Nebula Award. Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who builds herself a body from the remains of past meals - a chain for a backbone, a bear trap for an extra mouth. When hunters chase her out of her home, she is nursed back to health by Homily, a kind woman who takes her for a human - and Shesheshen, to her own horror, falls in love. Funny, strange and surprisingly tender.

Perfect for: Fans of cosy, quirky romantasy who like their love stories a little monstrous.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. On 28 January 1986, the space shuttle broke apart seventy-three seconds after launch, killing all seven people on board, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Adam Higginbotham follows the crew and the people around them through the years before the launch and the investigation after it - a story of ingenuity undone by cost-cutting, pressure and ignored warnings.

Perfect for: Anyone who remembers January 1986, and readers who like their history to read like a thriller.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Angelica and Eliza Schuyler, daughters of a Hudson Valley aristocratic family, were every bit as formidable as the men they loved and married - among them Alexander Hamilton, who called them his "dear brunettes". Amanda Vaill tells the story of America's founding era through their lives, and gives the two women the starring role history long denied them.

Perfect for: Hamilton fans who want the real story behind the musical.

Why it’s here: The most awarded history book of the year: the Pulitzer, the Bancroft, the Cundill and the Mark Lynton prizes. Kathleen DuVal tells a thousand years of North American history from the side of its Indigenous nations - from cities that rivalled any in the world, through an age of climate change and upheaval, to the arrival of Europeans, who for a long time were far from in charge. It changes how you see a whole continent.

Perfect for: Readers who want a big, eye-opening history book that changes how they see a continent.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award. In the eighteenth century, two men set out to identify and describe all life on Earth: Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor who wanted tidy, fixed categories, and Georges-Louis de Buffon, a French aristocrat who saw life as an ever-changing swirl. Jason Roberts turns their rivalry into a gripping story whose consequences still shape how we think about nature.

Perfect for: Nature lovers and anyone who enjoys science told as a story of big personalities.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Journalist Karen Hao has covered OpenAI since 2019, when it was a nonprofit with safety at the heart of its mission. Her book follows how that changed, and what the race to build ever-bigger AI really costs - in chips, data, energy and the low-paid workers who clean up that data around the world.

Perfect for: The tech person in your life - and anyone who wants to understand what all the AI talk is about.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, among several other prizes. Tessa Hulls traces three generations of women in her family: her grandmother Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist who fled to Hong Kong after 1949 and wrote a bestselling memoir, her mother, and herself. A graphic memoir about love, grief, exile and mental illness - as beautiful to hold as it is to read.

Perfect for: Readers who have never tried a graphic book, and people who love a gift that is also an object.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. Kevin Fedarko and a friend set out to walk the entire length of the Grand Canyon - some 750 miles, mostly without trails, through the vertical wilderness between the rims and the Colorado River. What follows is a year-long effort in one of the wildest places on Earth: a funny, humbling adventure full of awe.

Perfect for: Hikers, armchair adventurers and anyone dreaming of next summer's trip.

Why it’s here: Winner of the 2026 Women's Prize. Sybil Van Antwerp is seventy-three, slowly losing her sight and always writing letters - to her children, her favourite authors, her doctor, her suitors and the infuriating gardening club. Through them her whole life comes into view, along with the one letter she has never been able to send. Witty, wise and quietly heartbreaking.

Perfect for: Your mum, your grandmother, or anyone who still writes letters.