The gentleman’s Christmas book list

A gentleman is educated and is therefore well read and a voracious reader. So many great books have come out in 2014, while old classics have been gaining notoriety once again. Here is the gentleman’s Christmas book list featuring classics, potboilers, non-fiction and the best new reads.

ONE SAVILE ROW: THE INVENTION OF THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN: GIEVES & HAWKES

, Perhaps the finest coffee table book money can buy, this comprehensive journal charts the fascinating history of Savile Row, as well as the birth of the English gentleman. A necessity for the sartorially inclined, not just because of the informative text but also the beautiful imagery, One Savile Row will not fail to impress.

£39.00 from Amazon.co.uk

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH BY RICHARD FLANAGAN

The Man Booker Prize has been awarded to fair few stinkers in recent years including Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. However Flanagan’s haunting story of love and betrayal in wartime Asia was a deserved winner of the top fiction award in the English language.

£7.95 from Amazon.co.uk

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT

Definitely not a book to read if you’re sensitive, The Sixth Extinction is a popular science book that chronicles past mass extinctions on Earth and explains how humans are at great risk of extinction in the 21st century. Although the book is clearly sensationalist, it does present a coherent argument that shows how monumental the impact of humans upon the earth has been.

£13.60 from Amazon.co.uk

SHARK BY WILL SELF

The sequel to the acclaimed Umbrella continues in much the same vain. Shark is a stream-of-consciousness novel that follows the psychiatrist Zack Busner who, this time, is running an experimental community for the mentally impaired. Like Umbrella the sequel is written in flowing prose with no chapters or paragraph breaks.

£13.99 from Amazon.co.uk

33 ARTISTS IN 3 ACTS BY SARAH THORNTON

The author of 7 Days in the Art World describes herself as ‘a sociologist of art’ and her latest exploration of artistic mediums out of control is wonderfully ethnographic – if somewhat acerbic. She explores artists psyches, personas and politics in this humorous, well written and informative book.

£16.00 from Amazon.co.uk

THE GOLDFINCH BY DONNA TARTT

The 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel was a staggering success and surprised many in literary circles. The Goldfinch is a bildungsroman (coming of age novel) and is told in retrospective first-person narration by Theodore Decker, a young man recalling his life growing up in New York City.

£4.49 from Amazon.co.uk

JURASSIC PARK BY MICHAEL CRICHTON

Fans of the films will rightly be excited by the upcoming Jurassic World, slated for release in 2015 but they should remember that they owe some of their praise to Michael Crichton whose subversive science fiction novel Jurassic Park inspired the famous film franchise. The novel was a critical and commercial success and definitely can be considered a modern sci-fi classic.

£5.59 from Amazon.co.uk

JOAN OF ARC: A HISTORY BY HELEN CASTOR

Joan of Arc is of course a traditional enemy of the English and has been the subject of derision for centuries. Blackadder once observes during a craze for all things French ‘Was the man who burned Joan of Arc just wasting good matches?’ But jokes aside, it’s great that this fascinating period of history is being uncovered and shown in a new light. The Maid of Orléans might not have been told by God to drive the English from France – but she was still a very interesting character.

£13.60 from Amazon.co.uk