Christmas is approaching, the rush for gifts has entered its peak and is more or less frenetic, but there is one certainty: a good novel is one of the best gifts (if not the best) to make friends, relatives and more happy. in general the people we care about. Of course, it is important to choose well, to indulge tastes, but the choice – like never before this year – should fall on some books that saw the light in 2024. In the last (almost) 365 days, there are plenty of proposals there have been countless, in this article I will simply point out what, in my opinion, are the best novels to give as gifts for Christmas 2024.

The fire you carry inside you (Marsilio)

Finalist for the Campiello Prize 2024, The fire you carry inside you (Marsilio) by Antonio Franchini is a novel that has the guise of a memoir, which finds its strong point in Angela, the author’s mother, a ‘controversial’ character, a woman with an impossible character, of whom the author gives a exhaustive picture, moving from one episode of life to another, focusing on the mother’s resentment and her inconsistency. A strong work, without mincing words, which has a sui generis heroine as its protagonist, and which wisely intersects comic times and moments with other melodramatic ones.

Interlude (Einaudi)

Acclaimed at home, awaited by numerous fans also in Italy: Interlude (Einaudi) by Sally Rooney is yet more proof of how the Irish writer is a master at delving into interpersonal relationships, laying bare her characters like few others. Peter and Ivan Koubek are two brothers, one a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – accomplished, skilled and seemingly beyond reproach. But now that his father has died, he takes sleeping pills and struggles to juggle two relationships with very different women. The other is a twenty-two-year-old chess champion. He has always considered himself a loser, a pariah, the antithesis of his easy-going older brother. Now, in the first weeks after losing his father, he meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from a turbulent past, and their lives quickly and intensely become intertwined.

The remaining summer (Guanda)

Second novel by Giulia Baldelli, The remaining summer (Guanda) is a work that investigates the destructive power of feelings starting from a tragic event, the death of a sister. For Adriano, reconstructing the girl’s suicide, which occurred twenty years earlier, is the closing of a circle, the awareness of having done everything possible to find a point of reunion with Betta, the sister who for a long time replaced an insecure mother and to a father who had abandoned them at any moment. A profound disappointment in love is the point of no return for Betta: a model girl and student, she takes the path of perdition, starts drinking and taking drugs. At 19, one night, he lay down on the tracks and died under a train.

The emporium of heaven and earth (Fazi)

Among the novels favored by Barack Obama and Steven Spielberg, who is working on a adaptation for the big screen, The emporium of heaven and earth (Fazi) by James McBride once again confirms the narrative depth of its author. In the 1930s, mainly black people and Jewish immigrants lived in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, including the spouses Moshe and Chona. He owns a club, she runs a convenience store. After the death of his mother, the two decide to welcome Dodo, a twelve-year-old boy left deaf following a domestic accident, who the State intends to take and relegate to a special institution for children with problems. Moshe and Chona decide to hide him in their house. But, following a tip-off, Doc Roberts, a white and racist doctor, goes to the scene and ends up attacking the woman and raping her, while Dodo, the only witness, is taken away by the police who arrive on the scene.

Winter (The Ship of Theseus)

Compact novel, with a tight narrative, which leaves no room for downtime. Winter (The Ship of Theseus) by Dario Voltolini is the story of Gino, the author’s father. Butcher by profession, he spends his days separating muscles, removing organs and bones. And then he sells them to customers at the Porta Palazzo market in Turin. A profession like many others, repetitive and which leaves no room for variations on the theme, but which is a “ferryman between the two shores of the flesh”, the living and the dead. By a twist of fate, Gino contracts a bacteria at work. It begins with an infection, continues with exhaustion, a feral diagnosis, health protocols, trips to clinics abroad. Dario, the son, is only twenty years old, he sees his father deteriorating in front of him and understands the proximity of his farewell.

Lucy in front of the sea (Einaudi)

Fourth chapter of Lucy Barton’s cycle (enjoyable even without having read the three previous ‘episodes’), Lucy in front of the sea (Einaudi) by Elizabet Strout investigates the universal malaise and uncertainties in the first phase of Covid, the one that saw the world, at various latitudes, end up in lockdown. The author tells of Lucy’s disorientation, what everyone – some before and some later – has experienced. When news of a potentially lethal virus begins to reach New York, her ex-husband convinces Lucy to quickly pack her bags and follow him to a rented house in Crosby for a few weeks. Lucy reluctantly accepts, unaware that once she left her apartment in New York, the one where she had lived with her late husband, she would never see him again.

When you die, stay with me (Bao)

A comic novel that talks about a difficulty that is typical of most people, that of being able to verbalize emotions. This is the basis of When you die, it remains with me (Bao), Zerocalcare’s latest graphic novel, released last May 7th. At 40, Calcare embarks on a car journey with his father to Merìn, a fantasy village in the Dolomites where the ancestors of his father’s family come from. The reason for the ‘expedition’ is a problem with the house inherited by the same father, who was warned of a loss by a mysterious ‘pirate’ woman. The long journey to travel to reach the destination, and 48 hours in the mountain resort lost in nowhere, could be the opportunity for the protagonist to better understand ‘Parent 2’, but father and son, polar opposites in interests, are not capable of talk about meaningful things.

Alma (Feltrinelli)

Winner of the Campiello Prize, Alma (Feltrinelli) by Federica Manzon passionately weaves together history and geography in a narrative thread that looks at the past and the present as its reflection, scrupulously investigating the events of the ‘border peoples’, of Tito’s Yugoslavia – seen through the naive eyes of who was only a child at the time -, of its disintegration and of the war conflicts in the Balkans in the first half of the nineties. Everything is seen through the eyes of Alma, a journalist transplanted to the capital, who returns for three days to Trieste, the city of her childhood from which she fled to make a new life elsewhere. Her visit to the Julian capital is the opportunity to collect the unexpected legacy left to her by her father, a man without roots, used to living his life in an elusive way.

The unicorn girl (Marsilio)

A little gem, in just over a hundred pages. The unicorn girl (Marsilio) by Giulia Sara Miori is a short but intense debut work, capable of leaving the reader with many questions to find answers to. The story is apparently simple: Mr. Cattaneo, on his birthday, is taken by two men: it is a ‘sui generis’ kidnapping. Blindfolded, he is led to a mysterious building, in which the color white reigns supreme: an aseptic environment, from which it is impossible to draw the slightest clue. Here, his kidnappers subject him to intense interrogations, asking him everything: about his work and his passions, about his ex-wife from whom he separated five years earlier, about his sexual life and his habits. Questions to which the two shady figures already seem to have answers, and which also involve a mysterious unicorn girl.

Young couple having fun outdoors (Guanda)

A modern family drama, capable of upsetting everyday life. Young couple has fun outdoors (Guanda) by the Indian writer Aravind Jayan tells the story of Sree, the protagonist together with his girlfriend Anita of a film published on a porn site, which is making the rounds on the internet. When the news spreads among friends and acquaintances, the family’s hard-earned status is shattered and the war between the two factions – that of Sree and Anita on one side and that of their families on the other – becomes a viral and emblematic story of a broader intergenerational struggle.