The Penguin Hotline Recommends: Gifts for the Lit Lover

Jacqueline Woodson is a national treasure – readers of all ages come to her National Book Award-winning books for her moving stories and gorgeously drawn characters. This is only her second-ever novel for adults, and somehow she manages to touch issues of race, class, sexuality, parenthood, and loss all in this spare and transfixing novel. And the jacket is so beautiful, it already looks like a perfect jewel of a gift!

This novel is the literary Instagram status symbol of 2019, popping up on feeds from Lena Dunham to Taylor Swift. “The first great millennial novelist” might be the label getting thrown at this Booker Prize longlisted author, but plenty of readers in their 30s, 40s, and 50s have been inhaling her fiction as well, and for good reason. This novel manages to be decadent – lots of sex, status, betrayal – while still being whipsmart as Rooney unpacks the rollercoaster ride of young love.

Some smarty pants readers are so sharp, funny, and neurotic that they’re difficult to please: they love This American Life and Curb Your Enthusiasm, do the Sunday crossword in under 10 minutes, and they’re so up on books and media trends that they feel impossible to shop for. Well here’s fiction for them: cult Israeli fiction star Etgar Keret has a brand new story collection, with wickedly funny and darkly dark dark (yes that’s three darks) short stories of existential malaise in a world crumbling apart.

If you need a good novel for an aspiring writer – maybe an MFA student, even – one who loves Twin Peaks and Fleabag, shops vintage and perhaps sports hip and weird nail art – this novel is for her. A surreal, creepy, bitingly funny send-up of writing workshops, cool girl cliques, and the competitive hotbed of university life, this novel has a jaw-dropping twist midway through that will keep your reader shocked and cackling as she turns the pages.

Okay wait – your smarty pants reader is up on new books, hard to please, but more into arthouse cinema, experimental fiction, and indie rock like Vampire Weekend? This ambitious novel weaves through time while bringing the smoke, floods, snakes, the tastes and the sounds of Bangkok to vivid life. It’s threaded with sharp observations like “The most deafening thing he’s ever heard is the silence between two people” that will have your satisfied smart reader underlining, then gazing into middle distance.

Friends, this is not your grandfather’s Western: sure there are cacti and outlaws and wagons headed West – but there are also camels, ghosts, Ottoman immigrants, and a fierce woman homesteading in the desert. How their fates ultimately intersect will keep your reader turning the pages in this sweeping and propulsive adventure story, that delivers a West you’ve never seen like this before, from a bestselling and prize-winning young fiction star.

No literary list would be complete with this major new work from National Book Award winner Colson Whitehead. If your reader tends to camp outside of bookstores the night before big releases go on sale, they 100% own this novel already, but for the occasional smart book reader this is a slam dunk gift choice – this year’s “necessary read” (sez President Obama no big deal), a stunning, scorching novel about two young boys in a Jim Crow-era reform school.