2025 Christmas Book recommendations

Wendy Erskine’s much-anticipated first novel, which came out earlier in June – The Benefactors (Sceptre, £18.99) – has been hailed already as the maturity of a new imagination, as the author reaches out from the confines of acclaimed short stories to the wide plains of a novel. The cast of characters is vivid, modern, chaotic, adult and very engaging.

Also just out this minute is Sheena Wilkinson’s new novel Miss McVey Takes Charge (Writers Review Publishing, £11.99), the sequel to the best-selling Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau – anyone familiar with classic fiction for girls will rightly adore this. 

Cutting a dash in the fiction lists in 2025 was The Boy from The Sea (Picador £16.99), the debut adult novel from Garrett Carr which nimbly treads a line between magic and harsh reality on the Ulster coastline as a live babe washes ashore in a plastic barrel. 

A salute also for Derry girl Susanna Galbraith’s debut poetry collection Morsels (£15.99) from the very new Macha Press – strikingly original poems in a book with a fantastic design.

Donaghmore’s own Emma Heatherington has almost copyrighted Christmas with her series of heart-warming novels set each year in the festive season – now adding to This Christmas and Maybe Next Christmas comes Every Christmas Eve (Penguin Cornerstone, £9.99). Emma has recently been diagnosed with multiple myeloma but the irrepressible desire to tell and best-sell high-quality stories is stronger than ever and the charm is wondrous.

A shift of mood is Eoin McNamee’s The Bureau (Hachette, £18.99) – money laundering, border smuggling, crooked cops, drunken judges – guess where it’s set! – seriously dark work from a writer specialising in blending fact with fiction; ‘a great book,’ says Anna Burns, so don’t say you weren’t told.

Two stories, two couples, one stately location a century apart, are the ingredients of David Park’s latest novel Ghost Wedding (Oneworld, £16.99), which sustains the great writer’s recent close scrutiny of intense complex relationships.

If you’re looking a book for ages 4-7, seek out Big Thoughts Catch and Release Your Worries (Walker £12.99) by Laura Dockrill, with artwork by the brilliant Ashling Lindsay, who is also a star author, artist and an Arts Council ACE.

A compulsive read by a cracking local talent in historical romance fiction is The Irish Midwife (Hodder £9.99) by Séana Tinley, the beginning of a trilogy to appear over the next two years. Don’t be fooled – within the narrative is a gripping evocation of Ireland north and south in the period just before WWII, dark, unhealthy for women and with few options.

Look, it’s Christmas, so buy yourself a copy of Máire Zepf’s radiant debut novel, The Cloud Kingdom (Little Island, £16.00) – an “archipelago of interconnecting modern fairytales and fantasies” narrated by Nancy, a “human guide in the land of faeries”. It is matched with truly stunning artwork by the glorious Andrew Whitson. It’s just like a door in the wardrobe. Off you go.