The sad truth about Richard Osman and the Christmas books that will sell (and those that won’t)
More books will be sold in the next few weeks than in the rest of the year, but in a below-average year for new titles, be careful not to be swayed by award-winners and chart-toppers, says Robert McCrum. There are still far better options for gifts
In this season of lists, choosing Christmas presents in a favourite bookshop must rank high on any catalogue of winter’s secret pleasures.
A few weeks ago – reviewing Stephen King’s classic On Writing – when Christmas was still a remote suspicion of tinsel, I reported on the imminent opening of my friend Chloe’s new bookshop on a high street in Hardy’s Wessex. Today’s good news is that, midway between Bath and Salisbury, Fox & King is now open and ready for the first great challenge of any bookseller’s year: the Christmas Books Campaign, that annual offensive, with terrible losses in the No Man’s Land of British literary culture, where a gruesome roster of wannabe bestsellers are bestowed on aunts, nephews and stray in-laws.
Every year, the statistics repeat the same old story. Thirty per cent of new titles sold per annum in the UK will be traded in this “golden quarter” – October to December. A lucky handful of mega-winners will be matched by desolate platoons of losers – the many new titles that fail to pass muster. Amid the carnage, does this indicate a wider book bonanza? Yes and no.
First, we need to submit any Christmas list to some ageless criteria. In 1886, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette, the young Oscar Wilde declared: “Books today may be conveniently divided into three classes.” There were, he decided, “books to read” and “books to re-read”. No argument there. Finally, in an era that “has no time to think”, there were, he said, “books not to read at all”.
His response to this brutal taxonomy was Wildean, pure and simple: “Whosoever will select ‘the Worst 100 Books’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.”
The book market is never pure and rarely simple. Who knows what Oscar would have made of 2025? Never mind our having “no time to think”, our politics is broken, society’s enraged by social media; what’s more, there’s a wrecked economy, a ruined planet and a horribly monetised culture.
Browse these Christmas shelves at leisure, and read the runes. 2025 has not been a bumper year – far from it: there might be a case for saying that books are perhaps a mirror to an impending decline.
The sorry emblem of these times is The Impossible Treasure, the latest volume in nice Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. This year’s likely Christmas bestseller – a lazy gift for any gran, cousin, or misfit – is prolix, preposterous and pointless. No matter; like all its competitors, Fox & King has already romped through its preliminary order, and will be queueing up for more. Booksellers must dance to the reader’s tune.
Another creative dialogue taking place within the literary marketplace will be the way in which some writers are shaped by their audience. Crime/Thrillers is a mighty engine within successful bookshops today. With a beady eye on their audience, some very accomplished contemporary writers – John Banville, Kate Atkinson, JK Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) – have subordinated their pens to this genre, possibly because it seems to offer some obscure consolations.
When life makes no sense, with a disrupted world in flux, it’s reassuring to read about a time and place in which crimes are solved. In this cosy world whose titles often, inexplicably, have either a “bookshop” or a “swimming club” in the title, Rachel McLean and Tom Hindle (A Kller in Paradise; or Murder on Lake Garda) are household gods.
Another winning genre is the mash-up of memoir and nature-writing like the now classic H is for Hawk (2014). It is no surprise that Katherine May’s Wintering, and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton are still churning rich seasonal sales.
The bookshop market remains capricious. Nothing new there; that’s part of its charm. A generation back, in the fabled Eighties, one sure-fire Christmas choice would be the Booker Prize shortlist (six novels in search of new readers). The news from Fox & King is that this international literary prize, and also the Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly the Samuel Johnson), no longer excite much popular interest. This tide of indifference is echoed by the perfunctory coverage of Booker in the national press, at least in comparison to the fever surrounding, in recent memory, Midnight’s Children (1980) and The English Patient (1992).
Out in bookish Wessex – as good a straw poll as any – David Szalay’s Flesh has sold just one copy since taking Booker’s laurels. Similarly, with the Baillie Gifford, Helen Garner’s How to End a Story (Orion, £30) remains unsold. A better bet would be Frances Wilson’s exceptional Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury, £25).
Popular but pricey middlebrow hardbacks always enjoy steady pre-Christmas sales. Two top-selling titles, Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Hutchinson, £25) and Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Vermeer (Allen Lane, £30) compete this year with Mother Mary Comes To Me (Penguin) by Arundhati Roy. But all of these will be outsold by Middle England’s darling, Rory Stewart. His Middleland (Jonathan Cape £20) has become the ageing baby-boomer’s comfort read.
Finally, there’s always the cult book, driven by word of mouth, such as The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, even if, on my reading, his Cutting for Stone is superior. Also at Christmas, there are those titles – in the department of “no accounting for taste” – such as Always Remember: The Boy, The Mole, the Fox and the Horse and The Storm by Charles Mackesy. Published last year, this is still being bought by adults and children alike, as an inexplicable but harmless phenomenon. For a savage, cast-iron classic, why not try the Cambridge University Press-annotated edition of Gulliver’s Travels?
Such lists have their own addiction, but they are never the last word. A good list can – indeed must – challenge its own existence. Let’s agree that if 2025 has been a below-average year for new titles, a good bookshop can still fulfil that hankering, after Wilde, for “the great re-read”. I’ve never believed in “instant classics”, but here’s a Top Three of Must Reads – Well-Kept Secrets, or Golden Perennials – you’d hope to find in a good high-street bookshop:
1. Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
2. Jilly Cooper: Rivals
3. Elizabeth Taylor: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Happy Christmas!
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