If there is a better gift to give than books, we don’t want to hear it. Here are thirty books we loved reading this year. They could easily be on a Best of 2016 list, but we think they belong here as gift guide for you. Every last one is just perfect for someone on your Christmas list. This is The Ultimate Book Gift List from us to you with love. So just fire up that Amazon Prime and start crossing people off your list today.

1. Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Coming of age stories, while charming and poignant, don’t always make great novels. This novel with its plucky, awkward 14-year-old narrator June avoids the pitfalls of the genre.  June feels like she was born in the wrong era and yearns to be a falconer. When her story begins, it’s 1987 New York and her favorite uncle has just died of AIDS. June’s unlikely friendship with her uncle’s boyfriend forms the backbone of the novel. Erin gave up an afternoon to read it in big gulp. This is one you’ll miss when it’s over.

2. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

While these fictional stories are not necessarily true,  their “truth” is irrefutable. A masterful storyteller, Gyasi weaves these stories of slavery and racism without ever becoming preachy or judgmental. While she structures the novel to bridge two continents and cultures to tell the stories of two African half-sisters and their descendants, she can easily not just tell the poignant details of their lives, but reveal larger truths about mankind’s cruelty to each other.

3. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

One of Erin’s friends recommended this one with the caveat, “When it gets hard, that’s when it starts to get good.” This book slammed into Erin’s life. By articulating the class struggle and placing it into historical context, it forces the reader to confront prejudices and an examination of some of the darker truths of the American Dream.  A quick read that generates introspection, it will sit with you long after you turn the last page.

4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Erin’s brother-in-law recommended this one and if you want to be challenged about what you think you know about human history and how you know it, this is the book for you. It’s a delight to read and the ideas inherent in it force you to confront your expectations of mankind and what we have done as a species. As a Social Studies teacher, Erin found it fascinating. As a reader, she found it to be a quick, satisfying read that gave her space to contemplate some larger questions about the world.

5. Beyond the Break by Kristen Mae

Haunting and beautiful with depths that beg to be plumbed, this book brings it and then some. Well-rounded characters and gorgeous imagery set the stage for one killer knock-out of a book. This book is sexy with a capital S. Flawed, lovable Hazel and magnetic Claire will change everything you thought you knew about love, sexual attraction, and chemistry.

6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

A quick moving plot, well-defined characters, and settings that transport the reader to another time and place set the stage for a book that you will not want to put down. A debut novel by an actual architect, this story of the transformation of Bernard, a man caught in  historical and moral crossroads, delivers drama and authenticity, a double whammy any reader can appreciate. Riddled with uncertainties, Bernard decides that he can work with both sides, but as the novel unfolds, he discovers where he truly stands. The journey to that self-discovery is the heart of this novel.

7. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

 As parents of young people just starting to make their way in the world, this is a hopeful book. As women of a certain age, it’s a bit devastating too. On the one hand, Kalanithi and his story is a beautiful tale of a life well-lived. On the other hand, it was one cut tragically short by cancer. A coming of age story as well as the story of his battle with cancer, his tale is populated with poignant and illustrative scenes. But by far the best thing about this book is Kalanithi’s lovely writing. His beautiful mind and spirit come alive in the pages. Our world is better for having had this man and now  his book in it.

8. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

A riveting account of the crew that captured the gold medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Told through the eyes of Joe Rantz, a remarkable man who overcame much adversity to be one of the “boys in the boat,” this story is not so much about rowing as a sport but the power of sport to change lives. Erin rowed crew in college and Brown gets the details of the sport just right even though he never rowed. Vivid characters and a moving story propel this story to the ranks of “Must Read.”

9. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Our friend Nina described this book as a book lover’s book. She is one of those friends who is usually right, so we just nod and listen to her. We are oh so happy we did. The quirky A.J. Fikry is an unlikely one to root for, but as the story unfolds, you can hardly help yourself.  Loss, romance, and even a bit of mystery are peppered throughout and layered with humor. Each chapter doesn’t just advance the narrative but serves as an homage to one of Fikry’s favorite books. If you have ever lost or found yourself between the pages of a book, this is a must read.

10. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

We just love Ann Patchett, so it’s always hard when a favorite author has a new book. Will it be the worthy of the same love and devoted following as her other books? The answer here is “Oh, hell yeah!”  A novel about two families whose fates are sealed at a Christening party with a large bottle of gin and ripe oranges. Moving back and forth in time and between members of the Cousins and Keating families, Patchett nails family life. The Greek tragedy and comedy of the whole enterprise is alive and well in her telling here. You will nod your head in recognition, laugh out loud, and even mist up. It’s a helluva read and that’s why it has to be one of this year’s best!

11. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

This is a hard read, but you just have to do it. “Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done.” This right here is the silent whisper in the shadow of each chapter. It’s what compels you to keep reading all the hard things contained in these pages and keep confronting the systemic inequities that cripple our ability as a nation to truly be free. We read this one with a group of friends and were able to laugh, cry, and wrestle with the uncomfortable truths within together. Whether you go it alone or find a buddy or ten to share it with, this book is one that needs to be read in the way that air needs to make it to lungs and water needs to slate thirst. This is not a just a book, so much as force of nature in your life. You will be different from reading it, but that’s the beauty and gift of it.

12. A Window Opens  by Elisabeth Egan

On the surface this book is nothing special, a familiar story about a SAHM who suddenly has to work full time. But “Danger, Will Robinson”, it’s the quiet ones that will get you. With its light, breezy touch, infinitely likable characters, and easily recognizable tensions, this book will sink its stealthy hooks into you and then spit you out an afternoon later. Erin adored Alice, her kids, and her very believable relationship with her husband. This may not be ground-breaking fiction, but it is a wholly satisfying, utterly delicious piece of literary pie.

13. My Name Is Lucy Barton

We both love every opportunity to worship at the altar of the inimitable Strout and this book illustrates perfectly why. This simple and unassuming story is a powerhouse of story-telling. Lucy is recovering in a hospital bed when her estranged mom comes to visit. However, Lucy is no ordinary protagonist and Strout is no ordinary writer, so the results are literary fireworks. Small but mighty, this slim novel packs a lot of extraordinary into a tight, narrative thread. The perfectly rendered imperfect relationship between Lucy and her mother is a reader’s dream: nuanced, fully realized, and ringing with truth. This one is a keeper.

14.  Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

Every member of Erin’s family devoured this book this summer. The premise: a plane crashes, and there are only 2 survivors, one of them a young child. The promise: a story that unfolds with a few surprises full of characters you care about and a mystery you are interested in solving. You will stay up late to read the backstories of the people on the plane and find out what happened to the ill-fated flight. Fascinating and entirely unputdownable, this is a book that was on everybody’s must read lists this summer. If you haven’t read it, move it to the top of yours.

15. The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore

Any parent who has been through it will tell you: college admissions is an emotional pressure cooker. Nothing quite captures the high highs and the low lows quite like this utterly delectable piece of fiction. The Hawthornes are a family so familiar you feel from the first page like you might be reading about your next door neighbors. As their oldest gets put through the wringer applying to Harvard, dad’s alma mater, so do the rest of them. As the pressure is on, things start to unravel and secrets are revealed. Bottom line: an immensely enjoyable read for you that will make you grateful for your own process in comparison.

16. Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour

When it comes to advice about college, we listen to our friends Lisa and Mary Dell who write over at Grown and Flown, a great online resource for parenting through this next phase of life. They told us to buy this book, and we are ever so grateful they did. Chock full of great research, stellar examples, and good advice, this book is a gem, but what we felt was most helpful was the overall tone. Damour’s message time and time again is that we, as parents, can do this very hard thing of parenting our girls through this tough phase of development.  With the cool confident tone of a priest or a hostage negotiator, Damour emphasizes  that there is more than one way to “get this right.”  Our harried teen mom hearts wish we could clone her and carry her around in our pockets to talk us down off our ledges when the time comes. In the end, this is one book that will deliver all of you to the other side and get you ready for the big, beautiful things that lie ahead.

17. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by John Krakauer  

This one might make you want to lock up ALL of your college aged kiddos, but you HAVE to read it. You know how we love to talk to kids about everything from sex to drugs to alcohol. Well, Krakauer lays out why we need to talk to our kids about alcohol and campus rape too. YIKES! But why, you ask? WHY?! We get that this is a tough read in many places, but Krakauer’s firm steady journalistic hand makes this one of the best, most important (but still immensely readable) things you can read, especially if you have kids filling out college applications or already cozied up in dorm rooms. It is a book that launched a thousand conversations for us. We are sharing it with you in the hopes that it will do the same in your family. A MUST read!

18. How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

This, from Julie Lythcott-Haims’ Amazon author page, is one of the reasons we love her and her book:

I am deeply interested in humans – all of us – living lives of meaning and purpose, which requires figuring out what we’re good at and what we love, and being the best version of that self we can be. So I’m interested in what gets in the way of that.

Um, yeah, all of what she said. This is not a book about helicopter parenting, per se, so much as a path through the fears that can interfere with our parenting and foil our relationships with our kids. Lythcott-Haims tells us how we as a society evolved to this style of parenting and how to break the bad habits that threaten the job we are trying to do. Such insight in such a readable form! A book we keep coming back to again and again!

19. The Lake House  by Kate Morton

After a lovely party at the lake house, the Edevane family’s 11 month old son Theo goes missing. Morton’s page turner takes this pivotal moment in a family’s history and creates something special and utterly unputdownable. Told from two vantage points–2003 London and 1930s Cornwall–this book will have you ignoring kids just to figure out what is happening and where this story will go. As always, Morton’s gift for managing complicated story lines while simultaneously creating well-developed characters will make you grateful for all that extra time you have to read.

20. The Quiet Game  by Greg Iles

A good friend recommended this book calling it a “sexy beast of a read”. If you are anything like me, that alone might make you want to read this book, but if it doesn’t, try this: this is a novel that won’t be compartmentalized. A virtual smorgasbord of all good things literary, this book has action, suspense, courtroom drama, some literary allusions, and even a tiny sprinkling of horror toward the end. There are no small bites here; you will devour this book. Without a dull moment in sight, this book grips you from the first sentence and keeps you entertained and hungry for more until it delivers one sad reader at the very end. You will miss these characters and this story when it’s gone. Lucky for all of us, this is book one in a five book series. Read on, book warriors!

21. The Widow by Fiona Barton

Don’t read the dust jacket: this book is neither Gone Girl nor The Girl on the Train, both books we really, really liked even with their creepy, psychological suspense. It IS a great read though. In fact, it reminded us more of Leanne Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret with the marital secrets and the mystery at the heart of it. Sometimes, multiple points of view can be distracting, but in this case, the structure of the novel contributes to some of the magic. Be forewarned: you could easily lose an afternoon falling down this delightful rabbit hole, but the pay-off is worth it!

22. I Am Malala by Malala Yousafazi

Our book club read this one this year, and we universally loved and were inspired by it. So much so that those of us who had borrowed it from the library purchased copies to share with our kids. We were mesmerized by Malala’s chilling account of her hometown being taken over and then living under extremist terrorists, moved by her descriptions of the Swat Valley where she grew up, and emboldened by her courage. The book held up for us as a read, not just a recounting. 2016 is The Year for Global Girls. Lose yourself in Malala’ s incredible story and find yourself fired up about getting girls all over the world access to educational opportunities.

 23. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

 We share a huge author crush on Rainbow Rowell. We both LOVED Eleanor & Park and Fangirl, so we had huge expectations for this book, especially because favorite characters from Fangirl show up again in this story. Well, the inimitable Rowell never fails to surprise, entertain, and stun us with her craft and cleverness. She can also give you that rare stomach flip. Even in a book about magic, she is the real deal. Before you start to call this book Harry Potter for big kids, you have to know that this book is its own brand of special. How do we know? Over 500 pages disappear in a flash before your very eyes. This is Rowell at her best. The results? Magical.

24. Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline

Erin gobbled this one right up. She even took it backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. Nothing says “must read” like a willingness to cart those extra ounces up and down a mountain. In any case, the novel opens as stay-at-home mom Allison’s life is about to go off the rails. She goes to her childhood best friend’s book signing one night and has a little too much to drink. Mere hours later, she is involved in a fatal accident in which a child dies. The air you take into your lungs in the big gasp in the beginning takes this whole well-paced novel to be released. This may not be high literature, but it is a captivating read that makes you think. Like we said, you are gonna want to take big bites of this one.

25.  Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Erin laughed, cried, and ignored her kids for three days to finish this piece of book crack in the big, sloppy gulps it demands. You know from the beginning that there has been a terrible tragedy at the local school’s Trivia Night, because Moriarty leaves little crumbs at the end of each chapter. But that’s not the story here. This is NOT another legal thriller. A big, sprawling character study of modern moms, it may be. An ironic, funny take on modern parenting, it definitely is! It’s also a rollicking good time. You’ll laugh and cringe at just how right Moriarty gets all the characters hanging out in the school parking lot. A great read for fall while still reminiscent of that last joyful moment of summer indulgence.

26. Unbecoming: A Novel by Rebecca Sherm

A book lover’s dream, this first novel has the trifecta for a satisfying read: great well-developed characters, a dynamic and well-paced plot, and some nice curve balls to keep you guessing. Our protagonist Grace looks like a simple girl from Tennessee, but she can’t hide her complex and slippery character for long. You’ll root for her and want to wring her neck in equal measure.  There’s a question that hangs over the novel from the beginning that’s begging to be answered and when Scherm finally gets around to it, you are grateful for the care she took in the build-up as well as the payoff itself. This is a debut that leaves you wanting more.

 27. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Moms of daughters, beware: this read will make you want to lock your girls up and throw away the key. But despite the dark cloud that hangs over this novel as a teen girl goes missing, there is so much to enjoy as well. Ng is a writer’s writer and she doesn’t so much document this family’s unraveling as their personal hell unfolds as invite you to pull at the fraying threads with her. At once, a novel about family, the mother/daughter dynamic, and cultural divides, this book is also achingly real and familiar. The truth hurts so bad in this one, but the reader is so grateful for every perfect note Ng hits. If the ship is going down, we might as well learn something from the trip. Ng makes sure she plumbs the depths so well that this is one dark corner now revealed.

28. Modern Lovers by Emma Straub

Erin always considers it a good thing when she wants to throttle and hug the characters in equal measure. Straub’s story offers up characters that deliver on this front. College bandmates now mellowing in middle age, Elizabeth and Andrew who are married live down the street from old bandmate Zoe and her wife Jane. The band’s fourth member Lydia achieved some success on her own. When a film about Lydia’s life requires them all to touch the past, their present unravels a little at the seams. Straub’s deft hand controls the realistic tensions, steers the careful and realistic examination of midlife, and delivers characters that resonate. A satisfying, well-paced read by a gifted writer.

29. The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

If you can judge a family by its flaws, the Plumbs are a perfect hot mess of a crew. They also couldn’t be more charming. The novel kicks off with the family inheritance in jeopardy after one of the siblings gets himself into hot water. As the four siblings wrestle with the mess left behind, it would be tempting to dismiss them as shallow or lacking substance. However, Sweeney gives each character multiple dimensions. She exposes their humanity and moves the story along. In doing so, their tale of personal woes, family ties, and thwarted ambitions is reminiscent of challenges we all face. A thoroughly entertaining read.

 30. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Marriage isn’t a straight narrative so much as a thousand shimmering moments—beautiful, terrible, and strange—and Offill lays them all out for us in this gripping, lovely book about what it means to take this particular trip. With her unique gift for plucking the extraordinary from the everyday, Offill doesn’t just offer up moments from a marriage but gives us glimpses of the diamonds hidden in the rough patches as well. Offill’s structuring of the story can be the reader’s hard work. Through her careful curation of snippets from the marriage at the heart of this novel, Offill leaves the reader asking on every page—how do these pieces fit together? what does this mean here? Yet it’s these tenuous but important questions that serve the story she is trying to tell and give the reader a satisfying and wonderful read. 

We hope these page turners will make it easier to thrill any readers on your list.

Of course, you could just print this list out and hope they end up under your own tree.

Either way, here’s to Happy Holidays and  Reading!

Erin and Ellen

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