Virago Festive Gift Guide

Be inspired to give books this festive season. Scroll down for a guide to ten books – perfect for the readers in your life.

From essay collections, fiction in translation, short stories and both a Pultizer Prize nominated and Booker Longlisted novel – we’ve got a book to suit every reader in your life. Scroll down to explore our recommendations.

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After Midnight

Daphne du Maurier

For the person always reading short stories

Discover Daphne du Maurier at her darkest, After Midnight is a stunning collection of thirteen chilling stories from the Godmother of Fear, introduced by international bestseller Stephen King.

From the inimitable imagination of Daphne du Maurier, these thirteen stories pierce to the dark heart of our relationships: between men and women, humanity and nature, love and obsession, the future and the past. Uncanny, provocative and spine-crawlingly terrifying, these tales will keep you up long after midnight. Whatever you do, don’t look now . . .

Endling

Maria Reva

For the person who always reads the Booker Prize list

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Endling is an unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work-entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism.

Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.

So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.

Ghostroots

‘Pemi Aguda

For the person whose favourite celebration is Halloween

An electrifying, terrifying collection of literary horror stories from a prize-winning young star of Nigerian writing.

Exploring the dark borders between psychology and superstition, these feverishly imaginative stories of trauma, betrayal, terror and love lay bare the forces of myth, tradition, gender, sexuality and modernity in Nigerian society. Here are characters cursed by guilt, bound by the ties of ancestors and community; or enchanted by the allure of mysticism and would-be prophets. Powered by a deep empathy, and glinting with humour and insight, they announce a major new literary talent.

It’s Terrible the Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

For the friend who loves to debate celebrity culture

How does an icon become an icon? How did Anna Nicole Smith model herself on Marilyn Monroe? What connects Lindsay Lohan with Elizabeth Taylor? How is self-made beauty Pamela Anderson like trans bond girl Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey?

In a series of interconnected essays about pairs of famous women, award-nominated essayist and art critic Philippa Snow explores the echoes and connections between a constellation of female stars and lays bare the artful and gruelling demands of femininity – from the golden age of Hollywood to the Instagram era. Full of the fascinating, entertaining and lurid details you might expect from the lives of mega-famous celebrities, dissected with icicle-sharp intelligence and rendered in stylish, flamboyant prose, Philippa Snow’s first full-length non-fiction work is a radically insightful book about the complex meanings and layers of femininity in a male-dominated world.

One Fine Day

Mollie Panter-Downes

For the classics reader on your gift list

Exquisitely written and achingly poignant, One Fine Day is an unforgettable portrait of a world, and a marriage, changed forever by war – perfect for fans of Small Pleasures and A Month in the Country.

A hot summer’s day in 1946. The village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rusting coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall must find their way in an altered, shabbier world. Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. Hour by hour, as the glorious weather holds, the Marshalls and their daughter Victoria are preoccupied by the small pleasures and irritations of everyday life. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see how much could have been lost – and how much the future might still hold.

Ordinary Love

Marie Rutkoski

For the person in multiple book clubs

There’s no such thing as an ordinary love story

When Emily catches sight of Gennifer Hall at a party, she is transported back to the moment they fell in love as teenagers. Their connection was electric, and they thought it was forever.

Twenty years later, Gen is an Olympic runner, the career she strived for, while Emily is living a picture-perfect life: Manhattan townhouse, two young children and a wealthy husband, Jack. But Jack’s controlling behaviour is spiralling, and Emily has lost sight of who she once was.

Now, despite Emily’s fracturing marriage and the pressures of Gen’s career, they are drawn back together by a magnetic attraction. After years of heartbreak, missed chances and misunderstandings, will they finally get a second chance at first love?

Ordinary Love is a sweeping love story about desire, friendship, mistakes and the possibility of second chances, for fans of The Paper Palace and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

The Dilemmas of Working Women

Fumio Yamamoto

For the person who devoured Butter last year and hasn’t stopped talking about Convenience Store Woman

In this classic Japanese bestseller, published in English twenty-five years after it took Japan by storm, the lives of five ordinary women are depicted with irresistible humour and searing emotional insight.

‘Witty, wise and thought-provoking’ Cecelia Ahern

‘Crackles and pops with humour, empathy and intelligence’ Lisa Owens, author of Not Working

The Letter of Muriel Spark

Volume 1: 1944-1963

For the fan of whip-smart writing delivered in feisty vignettes

Selected from her extensive correspondence and insightfully edited and annotated, this is an essential read for anyone interested in Spark’s work and world.

In 1944, on her return to England after a disastrous marriage, Muriel Spark was unknown as a writer except to a handful of close friends; by 1963 she was the internationally renowned author of seven critically acclaimed, bestselling novels.

Her letters – witty, affectionate, sharp, mercurial – reveal the turbulence of her early career in postwar London: her struggles to earn a living as a writer, her difficult love affairs, a terrifying breakdown, and her conversion to Catholicism. They also trace her development from little-known poet to celebrated novelist, with glittering insights into the emergence of her unique literary voice, as well as her relationships with friends, lovers, writers and publishers.

The Unicorn Woman

Gayl Jones

For the fan of historical fiction

With her inimitable eye for beauty, tragedy and humour, Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of the Black imagination in a time of frustration and hope.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist for 2025.

A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he’s a man on a quest: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.

Returning from the Second World War not to a hero’s welcome, but to the discrimination of the Jim Crow laws, Buddy stumbles across the Unicorn Woman, a carnival sideshow with a horn growing from her forehead, whose strange beauty he can’t forget.

As he drifts across the South, from Kentucky to Memphis, Buddy encounters a dazzling array of almost mythic characters: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists and bigots – dreaming all the while of the unforgettable Unicorn Woman herself.

Wise Women

Sharon Blackie

For the wise woman in your life

An unforgettable collection of retold myths and folk tales, celebrating the wisdom and power of women in midlife and beyond, from the award-winning author of Hagitude.

This dazzling array of not-to-be-messed-with characters from a lost tradition of European myth and folklore – from ungainly giantesses and sequin-strewn fairy godmothers to misunderstood witches and craggy crones – provides inspiration for how women can walk boldly and live authentically in the second half of life.

Shop the Virago Gift Guide via the Virago Store and get 25% off your order.

Discount will automatically be applied at checkout.

Valid until Midnight 31st December 2025. For pre-Christmas delivery, complete your purchase before:

Royal Mail Mainland UK: 19th December

Europe: 15th December

ROW: 10th December