We at Bookends have spent the past year keeping tabs on the books of 2013 that have made an impression and which we think would make great stocking stuffers for the book lovers on your Christmas list. Here are 24 fab gift ideas.

1 The Dinner by Herman Koch

An internationally bestselling phenomenon that has been referred to by the Wall Street Journal as “a European Gone Girl”. The Dinner is the darkly suspenseful, literary tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives – all over the course of one meal.

It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened for terrible things that need to be said.

Each couple has a 15-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, and civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple must face the answer to the question: how far should a parent go to protect their children.

2 Sketcher by Roland Watson-Grant

This book is a Christmas pick not because around here we’re mad about Jamaican author Roland Watson-Grant. (But we make no apologies: we are! He’s one of the coolest people we’ve ever met.) Fact is, he’s insanely talented and he’s written a really good first novel that captures 1980s life in the American south brilliantly. Word is getting out there, too. He’s been nominated for Amazon Rising Stars 2013, named among The Spectator (UK) Writers’ Best Books of the Year (Christmas Choices), reviewed in The Times, London, The Independent and Catholic Weekly International. And the accolades just keep rolling in.

Sketcher tells the story of the Beaumont family living in the Louisiana swamp in the 1980s, as related by the nine-year-old protagonist, Skid Beaumont. It’s a novel about finding the beauty in life no matter how fractured it is.

3 50 Something Dates with 17 Mr Wrongs by Chénelle Taylor

A refreshingly candid anthology of the author’s disastrous (and often funny) dating experiences. Chénelle Taylor could very possibly be a Jamaican Candace Bushnell. She has a master’s in forensic psychology, and is unflinchingly plain-spoken. Jamaican women especially will be able to relate to the stories of courting gone haywire. They will wince, stifle giggles and shake their heads knowingly as they accompany Taylor on her dates with The Christian, The Artist, The Addict and so many other Mr Wrongs. But the book does not only cater to the sisterhood; Taylor clues in men as well. Indeed, it’s for “the girls who have been burned, broken and rejected in the noble efforts of taking risks and being hopeless romantics, and the men who just didn’t get it…”

4 And Caret Bay Again: New & Selected Poems by Velma Pollard

This collection – which includes poems from Pollard’s first four books in addition to about 20 new ones – has been described as being shaped by her sense of her Jamaican homeland’s difficult history and unparalleled natural beauty. Critics have said that the poems reach the heart of Caribbean tragedy, both political and personal, without sentimentality, stridency, or loss of hope, celebrating what is enduring through a conversational and thought-provoking female voice. We concur.

5 No Boy Like Amanda by Hope Barnett

Being the only girl among four brothers, aged between five and nine years, doesn’t make life easy for eight-year-old Amanda, who is constantly trying to get in on a piece of the action with the boys, who always seem to be having so much fun. Life in a north coast district in rural Jamaica, in a family with meagre resources, offers Amanda limited options to entertain herself, so she is determined to be one of the boys, despite the constant jeering and discouragement from her mean-spirited, eldest brother, Phil. Buoyed by an indomitable spirit, a doting father, as well as her first crush, she manages to force herself into the group and join the boys on a few adventures. When Amanda meets a new friend, Stephanie, who comes to spend an unforgettable summer with her well-to-do grandparents in the same district, that’s when she gets a chance to discover her true talents.

6 The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Jim and Bob Burgess, the brothers who are the title characters of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, The Burgess Boys, grew up fatherless in a small Maine town after an accident in the family car when they were young.

They were smart, though, and became lawyers in New York City. Now Jim, at 55, is a high-powered corporate attorney who once gained national media attention. Bob, at 51, is a legal aid lawyer with a more modest sense of himself. As the novel unfolds, they are drawn back to their hometown, revisiting old scars while struggling with a new shock to the family psyche.

This is Strout’s first book since her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, and her extraordinary narrative gifts are evident again.

7 Light Falling on Bamboo by Lawrence Scott

Scott’s latest novel is a fictionalised biography of Michel Jean Cazabon, a famous 19th-century Trinidadian landscape painter whose work has shown in the Louvre. Cazabon was educated in England and France, where he made something of a name for himself. He then returned to Trinidad in 1848 to attend to his beloved mother on her deathbed, leaving his white French wife and two children in Paris to be sent for at a later date. However, the politics of Trinidad are in flux following Emancipation. He is a free coloured man, but he must put up with many humiliations by his English students who speak of “niggers” in his presence, as if he should not mind. Cazabon is caught in a dilemma, needing to earn his way but also wanting to paint without having to ‘prettify’ the island views to please his patrons. Moral dilemma much?

8 Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma wa Ngugi

Two cops – one American, one Kenyan – team up to track down a deadly terrorist.

It’s December 2007. The Kenyan presidential elections have gotten off to a troubled start, with threats of ethnic violence in the air, and the reports about Barack Obama on the campaign trail in the United States are the subject of newspaper editorials and barstool debates. And Ishmael and O have just gotten their first big break for their new detective agency, Black Star.

A mysterious death they’re investigating appears to be linked to the recent bombing of a downtown Nairobi hotel. But local forces start to come down on them to back off the case, and then a startling act of violence tips the scales, setting them off on a round-the-globe pursuit of the shadowy forces behind it all.

9 Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

Crazy Rich Asians is a funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.

When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn’t know is that Nick’s family home happens to look like a palace, that she’ll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia’s most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back.

If you’re in the mood to explore how another culture lives – not that different from any other, at the end of the day – this one’s a lot of frothy fun.

10 She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me by Emma Brockes

A chilling work of psychological suspense, She Left Me the Gun is a tale of true transformation: the story of a young woman who reinvented herself so completely that her previous life seemed simply to vanish, and of a daughter who transcends her mother’s fears and reclaims an abandoned past. The memoir documents the author’s investigation into a shattering childhood trauma in South Africa, tracing the discovery of her grandfather’s abuse of her mother, which compelled her mother’s unsuccessful attempt to kill him before fleeing the country.

She Left Me the Gun carries Brockes to South Africa to meet her seven aunts and uncles, weighing their stories against her mother’s silences. Brockes learns of the violent pathologies and racial propaganda in which her grandfather was inculcated, and finds in buried government archives the court records proving his murder conviction years before he first married. Brockes also learns of the turncoat stepmother who may have perjured herself to save her husband, dooming Paula and her siblings to the machinations of their hated father.

11 We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Ten-year-old Darling has a choice: it’s down, or out…

We Need New Names tells the story of Darling and her friends Stina, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Bastard. They all used to have proper houses, with real rooms and furniture, but now they all live in a shanty called Paradise. They spend their days stealing guavas, playing games and wondering how to get the baby out of young Chipo’s stomach. They dream of escaping to other paradises – America, Dubai, Europe. But if they do escape, will these new lands bring everything they wish for?

12 Putting People First edited by Delano Franklyn

It’s said Jamaica is PNP country. Thanks in no small part to one of the country’s most loved or reviled statesmen (depending on your political outlook). Attorney at law, political strategist and former PNP senator Delano Franklyn reminds of the relevance of Manley’s policies and philosophy to present local and global problems in this, his eighth book, Michael Manley: Putting People First, a compilation of 10 scholarly lectures given, by a range of luminaries such as Kenny Anthony, Stephen Vasciannie, Barbara Gloudon and George Alleyne, since the inception of the Michael Manley Foundation’s Annual Lecture Series. A great reference book for students of Jamaican history.

13 We Are Water by Wally Lamb

A disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy, from Wally Lamb, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True.

After 27 years of marriage and three children, Anna Oh – wife, mother, outsider artist – has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her success. They plan to wed in the Oh family’s hometown of Three Rivers in Connecticut. But the wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora’s Box of toxic secrets – dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs’ lives.

We Are Water is a layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs – nonconformist Anna; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest. It is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.

With humour and compassion, Wally Lamb brilliantly captures the essence of human experience and the ways in which we search for love and meaning in our lives.

14 The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd

A mesmerising debut novel about a young woman, haunted by loss, who rediscovers passion and possibility when she’s drawn into the tangled lives of her neighbours.

Five years after her young husband’s death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighbourhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another’s privacy. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. She is determined to live a life at a remove from the chaos and competition of modern life. Everything changes with the arrival of a new tenant, Hope, a dazzling woman of a certain age on the run from her husband’s recent betrayal. When Hope begins a torrid and noisy affair, and another tenant mysteriously disappears, the carefully constructed walls of Celia’s world are tested and the sanctity of her building is shattered – through violence and sex, in turns tender and dark. Ultimately, Celia and her tenants are forced to abandon their separate spaces for a far more intimate one, leading to a surprising conclusion and the promise of genuine joy.

Amy Grace Loyd investigates interior spaces of the body and the New York warrens in which her characters live, offering a startling emotional honesty about the traffic between men and women. The Affairs of Others is a story about the irrepressibility of life and desire, no matter the sorrows or obstacles.

15 Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

King returns to the character and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance and the very special 12-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless – mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky 12-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to this icon in the King canon.

16 Sycamore Row by John Grisham

John Grisham’s A Time to Kill is one of the most popular novels of our time. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial – a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history.

Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made Brigance one of Ford County’s most notorious citizens, just three years earlier.

The second will raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think clearly? And what does it all have to do with a piece of land once known as Sycamore Row?

In Sycamore Row, John Grisham returns to the setting and the compelling characters that first established him as America’s favourite storyteller. Here, in his most assured and thrilling novel yet, is a powerful testament to the fact that Grisham remains the master of the legal thriller, nearly 25 years after the publication of A Time to Kill.

17 Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics – carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts – without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom – two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighbourhood – till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drugrunner in an art-deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead.

18 The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

In 1923, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

19 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity.

It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerising language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher’s calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

20 The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The winner of this year’s prestigious Man Booker award for fiction is an ambitious 832-page murder mystery set during a 19th-century gold rush.

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody, of course, is soon drawn into the mystery.

Author Catton was 25 when she started writing the book and 27 when she finished it. It’s BIG! The book’s elaborate narrative is structured according to astrological charts: It consists of 12 sections, each half the length of the last, from a 360-page opener to a final chapter of a single page.

21 If I Never Went Home by Ingrid Persaud

Sometimes the only way home is to leave the one you know.

Written in two distinct, alternating voices, If I Never Went Home follows 10 years in the turbulent lives of two narrators – 30-something Bea, an immigrant in Boston, and 10-year-old Tina in Trinidad – as they separately navigate devastating losses, illness and betrayal in their quest to belong.

Moving back and forth from the present to the past through flashbacks, this is the powerful story of how these women unearth family secrets that go beyond anything they could have imagined. Then unexpectedly their lives collide, and they are offered the chance to create a home. But can this gamble survive one last surprise about Tina’s real identity?

22 Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

In Lean In, Facebook CEO Sandberg shares personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to cut through the layers of ambiguity and bias surrounding the lives and choices of working women. She recounts her own decisions, mistakes, and daily struggles to make the right choices for herself, her career, and her family. She provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career, urging women to set boundaries and to abandon the myth of “having it all”. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfilment and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women in the workplace and at home.

Written with both humor and wisdom, Sandberg’s book is an inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth. Lean In is destined to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can.

23 The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I Koerner

In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of sixties idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. A shattered Army veteran and a mischievous party girl, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow commandeered Western Airlines Flight 701 as a vague protest against the war. Through a combination of savvy and dumb luck, the couple managed to flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom, a feat that made them notorious around the globe. Koerner spent four years chronicling this madcap tale, which involves a cast of characters ranging from exiled Black Panthers to African despots to French movie stars. He combed through over 4,000 declassified documents and interviewed scores of key figures in the drama – including one of the hijackers, whom Koerner discovered living in total obscurity. Yet The Skies Belong to Us is more than just an enthralling yarn about a spectacular heist and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath. It is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent, and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail.

24 The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.

In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.