FOR SOMEONE YOU WANT TO KNOW BETTER
The books that say something about the person who gives them.
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
The one you give to someone who wants to disappear into a book and emerge several days later emotionally changed.
A huge, devastating story about friendship, love, trauma and the strange ways people become family.
Give this to: someone who doesn't mind a book breaking their heart.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Beautiful people. Brilliant people. A tiny liberal arts college. Ancient Greek. Obsession. Murder.
Dark, glamorous and completely intoxicating.
Give this to: the person who would absolutely have joined the wrong crowd at university.
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
A story about family, forbidden love and the tiny moments that can quietly change everything.
And prose so beautiful you'll want to underline half the book.
Give this to: someone who notices beautiful sentences.
Stoner - John Williams
William Stoner lives a quiet, ordinary life.
And somehow this becomes one of the most moving books about what a life actually means.
Give this to: someone who thinks the best stories don't need much drama.
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
An English butler looks back on a life spent serving others and begins to wonder what was sacrificed along the way.
Quiet. Elegant. Devastating.
Give this to: someone who likes their heartbreak understated.
FOR THE PERSON WITH EXCELLENT TASTE
Books that feel like they belong on a very good coffee table - but are actually worth reading.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein - Coco Mellors
New York. Marriage. Money. Sex. Friendship. Art. A group of beautiful, complicated people making questionable decisions.
It feels like reading someone's very interesting group chat.
Give this to: someone who always knows the restaurant before everyone else does.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh
One woman decides to spend a year sleeping through her life.
Funny, bleak, strange and deeply addictive.
Give this to: someone with a dark sense of humour.
The Guest - Emma Cline
A young woman drifts through the Hamptons after a relationship ends.
Beautiful houses. Beautiful people. Increasingly bad decisions.
Give this to: someone who likes summer reading with a slightly sinister edge.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
First love, literature, university and the deeply strange experience of being young and not quite knowing what you're doing.
Very clever. Very funny. Very specific.
Give this to: the overthinker in your life.
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Grief, art, friendship, obsession, New York, Las Vegas and one very famous painting.
It is long.
You will not care.
Give this to: someone who wants a book to disappear into.
FOR SOMEONE WHO NEEDS A LITTLE MORE LIFE IN THEIR LIFE
The books you give when the gift is really: go outside, look around, notice things.
The Book of Delights - Ross Gay
Short essays about tiny, ordinary moments of joy.
Flowers. Strangers. Food. Friendship. A good day.
Give this to: someone who could use a reminder that life is happening right now.
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Science, nature, Indigenous knowledge and our relationship with the living world.
The sort of book that makes you look at a tree differently.
Give this to: someone who is happiest outside.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit
A meditation on wandering, uncertainty and the strange things that happen when you stop knowing exactly where you are going.
Give this to: someone whose life is currently far too organised.
The Anthropocene Reviewed - John Green
John Green reviews everything from sunsets to the Internet to the strange miracle of being human.
Funny, thoughtful and unexpectedly moving.
Give this to: someone who likes being made to think without being lectured.
The Creative Act - Rick Rubin
A beautiful little book about creativity, attention and making things.
You don't need to be an artist.
You just need to want to make something.
Give this to: the person with seventeen ideas and twelve unfinished projects.
FOR SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO GET LOST
Cancel your plans.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Friendship, video games, creativity, love and ambition.
A huge emotional story hiding inside a book about making games.
Give this to: someone who gets properly attached to fictional people.
Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
Four generations of one Korean family navigating love, identity, prejudice and survival.
An enormous story that never loses its intimacy.
Give this to: someone who loves a proper family saga.
Beautyland - Marie-Helene Bertino
An alien is sent to Earth to observe humanity and begins sending reports home.
What starts as an unusual science-fiction premise becomes something much more tender: a strange, funny and deeply human story about loneliness, belonging and what it means to be one of us.
Give this to: someone who likes their books clever, unusual and a little bit weird.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid
A reclusive Hollywood legend finally tells the story of a life lived almost entirely behind closed doors.
And why one particular person was chosen to hear it.
Give this to: someone who says they don't cry at books.
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil arrives in Moscow.
There is a talking cat.
Things get progressively stranger.
There is also a love story.
Give this to: someone who has read everything obvious.
FOR THE PERSON WHO ALREADY HAS EVERYTHING
Don't buy them another thing.
Give them a book they didn't know they needed.
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A tiny book with an enormous heart.
A prince travels between planets, meeting strange adults along the way, before discovering something rather profound about love, friendship and what actually matters.
Give this to: someone who has everything - except perhaps a reminder of what matters.
The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
Money, behaviour, luck, risk and why being good with money has surprisingly little to do with being good at maths.
Give this to: someone who needs a better money conversation.
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Why do we make the decisions we make?
Kahneman explores the shortcuts and biases hiding behind everyday thinking.
Give this to: the person who loves knowing why people behave the way they do.
On Freedom - Maggie Nelson
A sharp, expansive exploration of freedom through art, sex, climate and everyday life.
Give this to: someone who likes having their assumptions challenged.
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
A fragmented, strange and beautiful collection of thoughts from a fictional bookkeeper who spends an extraordinary amount of time thinking about existence.
Not a book you “finish.”
A book you dip into.
Give this to: someone who likes their books slightly mysterious.
THE ONES EVERYONE SHOULD READ ONCE
Yes, they're obvious.
They're obvious because they're brilliant.
Beloved - Toni Morrison
A ghost story, a love story and an exploration of the devastating legacy of slavery.
Difficult. Extraordinary. Unforgettable.
Give this to: someone ready for a book that demands something from them.
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
One day in London.
One party.
An entire interior universe.
Give this to: someone who likes books that make ordinary life feel enormous.
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Money. Desire. Reinvention. Parties. Obsession.
It's short, beautiful and somehow gets better every time.
Give this to: someone who says they don't really read classics.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Ambition, identity, expectation and the feeling of becoming someone you're not quite sure you recognise.
Still startlingly contemporary.
Give this to: someone who wants literature that feels personal.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
One family. Seven generations. A town that seems to exist outside ordinary time.
Love, ghosts, war, desire, superstition and an almost ridiculous amount of magical realism - all woven into one of the great family sagas.
Give this to: someone who wants to read something that feels completely unlike anything else.
THE UNWRAPD BOOKSHELF
Don't give someone a book.
Give them this book.
The one that reminds you of them.
The one you've been talking about for years.
The one they would never pick up for themselves.
The one they'll underline.
The one they'll lend to someone else.
The one they'll still remember ten years from now.
Because the best gifts aren't necessarily the things people want.
They're the things that make someone think:
How did you know?
BUILD YOUR UNWRAPD
Save the books you've loved.
Add the ones you want to read.
Share the ones you can't stop recommending.
Because your bookshelf is more than a collection.
It's a little map of your taste.
Discover your taste
Unwrapd turns your taste into a guide the people buying for you can actually shop from - three questions, one shareable page. Free to start.
Discover your taste →