Our 2016 Christmas Gift Guide: What to buy your parents

7 Nov 2016

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be compiling a host of gift guides to help you with your Christmas shopping.

Margaret Preston sheds light on the private life of the much-loved Australian artist, featuring her work, photographs and even recipes.
In The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair tells the unusual stories of 75 shades, dyes and hues, delving into history, politics and more.
Plant combines photographs and cutting-edge micrograph scans with watercolours, drawings and prints to celebrate the extraordinary diversity of plants.
Frida Kahlo at Home is a fully-illustrated hardcover book that examines the places that the celebrated Mexican artist called home.
Fine Jewelry Couture is a gorgeous and inspirational book featuring the designs of more than 35 master jewelry designers.

Cadel Evans is one of Australia’s greatest sportmen. In his memoir, The Art of Cycling, he writes about the triumphs, the frustrations, his enduring love of the sport, and more.
Now available in a paperback edition, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping history book, The Romanovs: 1613-1918, is an essential portrait of the empire that still defines Russia today.
Victoria is a provocative and authoritative new biography of Queen Victoria from Australian commentator and journalist Julia Baird.
In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty deftly depicts the life of American author and journalist Joan Didion.
Mark Colvin is one of Australia’s longest-serving broadcasters, and in his memoir, Light and Shadow, he reveals stories from his life of reportage, as well as what it was like to discover his diplomat father was really an M16 spy.

Two blockbuster crime authors have released new stories featuring beloved detectives this month: Lee Child’s Night School sees the return of Jack Reacher, and Ian Rankin’s Rather be the Devil sees the return of John Rebus.
For parents who prefer quirky crime reads (think Phryne Fisher) try Amy Stewart’s Lady Cop Makes Trouble or Sue Williams’s Dead Men Don’t Order Flake.
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders is a homage to the ‘golden age’ of detective fiction, that cleverly uses the format of a book inside a book to give readers two mysteries in one.
Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet was a favourite on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist for his historical crime thriller, His Bloody Project, and it’s certainly addictive.
You may also like to browse our collection of seasonal Christmas tales – a genre onto its own.

When Heidi Julavits reread her old diaries from childhood, she was struck by a desire to once again chronicle her daily life – now as a woman, wife, mother, and writer in her 40s. These diary entries are collected together in The Folded Clock, and it makes for smart, meditative and compulsiv readinge.
In his groundbreaking book, The Hidden Life of Trees, German forester Peter Wohlleben’s puts forth the compelling argument that a forest is a social network.
String Theory is a special publication from the Library of America that brings together David Foster Wallace’s five famous essays on tennis.
White Sands is a creative exploration of why we travel from one of Britain’s most original thinkers, Geoff Dyer.
In The Promise of Things, Ruth Quibell invites readers to consider what our possessions say about us – who we think we are, what we long for and struggle against.

Elizabeth J. Church’s debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, is set against the backdrop of the atomic bomb tests in Los Alamos, and is a great pick for readers who enjoy stories of women in science.
Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and Hannah Kent’s The Good People are two wonderful novels set in Ireland’s past.
In The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, Dominic Smith tracks a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian.
Moving from the plains of the West to Tennessee, Days Without End is the new novel from Sebastian Barry, and a masterpiece of brutal lyricism set in mid-nineteenth century America.
Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist is the story of a young man whose life in Vienna is irredeemably changed by the arrival of Nazism.

Doug Purdie’s new book, The Bee Friendly Garden, shares advice for how home gardeners can attract bees and other good bugs to their own green space, whatever the size.
Decluttering was the craze in 2015 but 2016 is all about ‘hygge’. The Book of Hygge demonstrates how readers can adopt this on-trend Danish art of living well in their own home.
Archie Roach is a favourite here at Readings, and we’re loving his latest album, Let Love Rule. Highly recommended for listening to as you potter about the house.
In The Cook’s Table, the brilliant Stephanie Alexander shares 25 of her favourite menus for entertaining family and friends – a great pick for parents who love entertaining.
Based on Gerald Durrell’s much-loved Corfu trilogy of novels, The Durrells is a warm, funny TV series about an English family’s adventures on a gorgeous Greek island and perfect for night spent snug at home.

Under Full Sail will appeal to parents who love seafaring tales. The perpetually popular Rob Mundle shares the ripping story of the Clipper ships, and the fearless characters aboard them.
Parents who love exploring Australia’s rich bushland will be intrigued by Don Watson’s A Single Tree, which assembles the raw material underpinning his award-winning The Bush (now in paperback).
In The Botanical Wallchart, botanist Anna Laurent presents a collection of wall charts from all over the globe, each accompanied by text explaining its historical and botanical contexts.
Part travel book and part detective story, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts delves into 12 of the most famous medieval manuscripts in existence.
Atlas Obscura features more than 600 lushly illustrated entries on wondrous, curious, eccentric, and bizarre locales – from the self-mummified monks of Japan to the ‘Gates of Hell’ (i.e. a 328 foot wide hole in the middle of the Turkmenistan desert that has been on fire for 40 years!).

Lesley Harding

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