Festive crackers ready to bring a little joy to your world
NINA Stibbe is the author of the wonderful memoir Love, Nina (recently made into a BBC One series) and the equally entertaining madcap novels Paradise Lodge and Man At The Helm.
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This festive gem of a stocking filler is a short collection of her musings on Christmas, punctuated with quirky seasonal short stories.
Stibbe recounts her mother’s many, varied and hopeless attempts to serve up a moist turkey on Christmas Day and skewers the modern pressure to buy the perfect present as “performance anxiety brought on by so much choice and the modern-day quest for kudos.”
She offers extensive suggestions for a Christmas music playlist and gives sporadically helpful gift shopping advice. (“Never give cigarettes or toothpaste unless the person is in prison.”)
I can’t get enough of Nina Stibbe’s writing, her keen eye for people’s foibles and her idiosyncratic perspective.
An Almost Perfect Christmas is essential reading for everyone who shares my enthusiasm.
But otherwise this volume, beautifully produced and festive though it is, may be a little too slight to win you over.
By CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE
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Ghosts Of Christmas Past, edited by Tim Martin (John Murray, £8.99)
Fed up with tinsel, sherry and syrupy renditions of Christmas carols? Then this collection of seasonal scary stories might be right up your street.
Christmas ghost stories are often thought of as a Victorian tradition but, as the editor of this new collection explains in his introduction, we have been enjoying spooky and spine-tingling tales at Christmas time for centuries.
This collection of 13 stories was written by a diverse group of authors including Jerome K Jerome, Muriel Spark and Louis de Bernières.
All are set during the festive period and they include hauntings, horror and some macabre humour thrown in for good measure.
Highlights include E Nesbit’s The Shadow, about a malevolent force that haunts a young married couple, and LP Hartley’s Someone In The Lift where a young boy’s hallucination becomes a terrifying reality.
This is the perfect read for a cold winter’s evening. Just make sure you remember to leave the lights on.
By MERNIE GILMORE
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The Deaths Of December, by Susi Holliday (Mulholland, £7.99)
An advent calendar is delivered to a police station addressed to “a detective who knows what to do”.
It attracts the attention of newly promoted officer DC Becky Greene.
Opening its first door, she is shocked to find a murder scene behind every numbered window of the calendar except for the last four.
At first she thinks a crime scene photographer is playing a prank.
Then the images behind the calendar doors are matched to murders that have taken place every December for the past 20 years across south-east England.
As DC Greene and DS Eddie Carmine realise the unsolved murders were all committed by the same person, they must re-open all the investigations.
And with four empty windows left in the advent calendar, four murders will be committed to fill them.
The numbers of the remaining windows relate to house numbers that will be targeted.
Without knowing the name of the street or even town, the pair are in a race against time to identify a killer intent on making this Christmas his bloodiest yet.
The Deaths Of December is a cracking read based on an inspired premise that builds to a highly enjoyable, if somewhat predictable, finale.
This twisted take on a cherished Christmas tradition is perfect for readers looking for a break from festive cheer.
By JON COATES
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The Indisputable Existence Of Santa Claus, by Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Thomas Oléron Evans (Black Swan, £9.99)
Opening with a tongue-in-cheek exploration of Santa’s existence and the problems that would arise if we really did have Christmas every day, The Indisputable Existence Of Santa Claus explores the mathematics of almost every conceivable aspect of Christmas.
They challenge the killjoy physicists who question the delivery of gifts by reindeer-driven sleigh to every child on earth in one evening.
Perhaps Santa has constructed a heat shield to protect his reindeer? Or invented a device to suppress sonic booms? Could Santa be a quantum object capable of being in two places at the same time?
They go on, rather more convincingly, to explore the maths of more practical questions. How much tinsel do you need to decorate a tree properly? What’s the optimal amount to spend on a present for a grumpy aunt? How much wrapping paper do you need for various shapes of present?
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Thu, April 23, 2015Imagine facing prison just for reading a book! As it's World Book Day, we're taking a look at some well-known novels that have been banned.
James Joyce's 'Ulysses' was banned in the UK and the USA until the 1930s on account of its sexually explicit content
Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, they issue a health warning to Santa about all those mince pies and glasses of sherry he drinks.
Even if he restricts himself to visiting Christian family homes, his calorific intake is equivalent to about 11 million kilos of fat, which far outweighs the energy requirements of his chimney-climbing.
No wonder poor Santa hibernates for the rest of the year.
Fry and Evans have compiled a guide to Christmas, written with great humour and lucid explanations of their mathematical workings.
And if you follow their instructions, it will even be perfectly wrapped.
By WILLIAM HARTSTON
