Give a Gift of Words this Festive Season

In this fast-paced era of gadgets and emoticons, the charm of books seems to have taken a back seat!

That curling up with your favourite book and a cup of hot coffee on a winter day, though sounds passé is still soul warming for many. There are people who appreciate good books and would love to receive them as gifts with a personal note from you!

Notice what do people around you talk about? Chances are if they like to read they will bring it up in the conversation at some point in time. That's your cue to find out more about what was the last book they read, otherwise, you can also directly ask the genre they prefer.

Most readers are particular about the genre they read. If you can find out in conversation it can help you find a book that they generally read.

If however, you have not had the opportunity to do so, you can also gift the book you have read and liked! This gives them something to experiment with and maybe this will open a new genre for them.

If you are not a reader yourself and want to gift a book to someone you don't know that well, you can combine a couple of books from the different genre. A blend of fiction and non-fiction works quite well! Depending on the age and gender you can choose from the best books available.

Here is a ready reckoner – a heady mix of different genre of fiction and a few non-fiction from 2017 releases for those who do not have the time to compare. This is a condensed list after comparing many sites. However, if you do have the time, do go through the individual lists at the links provided. Few sites to visit are Esquire, Time, Gazelle, and more.

When Peri Nalbantoglu is attacked on the streets of Istanbul one morning after a routine stop at Starbucks with her daughter, she mentions nothing to her bourgeois friends at a dinner party later that night. The attack sparks Peri to recall her Oxford University days, her infatuation with a controversial religious studies Professor, and her friendship with Shirin, an atheist Iranian, and Mona, a devout Egyptian Muslim. Shafak deftly explores feminism, religious extremism, and the politics of her native Turkey while flashing between the sumptuous dinner party and Peri's college days—all while keeping the sweeping saga compelling and alive.

Rushdie's provocative new novel opens on the historic eve of Barack Obama's election. Secretive billionaire Nero Golden and his three sons have recently moved into an exclusive Greenwich Village community where they meet a budding filmmaker René, the novel's narrator. René quickly decides that the Goldens are the perfect subject for a mockumentary style film, and this premise enables him to become fully immersed in the family's fraught ecosystem. When the Trump-like presidential candidate Gary "Green" Gwynplaine, who calls himself the Joker, enters the story, things become shockingly familiar. What follows is a riveting and timely examination of American politics and values.

Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, set in her homeland of India, was published in 1997 and became a global sensation. It traced the lives of Estha and Rahel, seven-year-old twins whose lives are changed one fateful day in 1969. In her second novel, released 20 years later, Roy turns her lens outward to examine India's rich but violent history and the catastrophic lingering effects of Partition. Told largely through the eyes of Anjum, born a hermaphrodite, the novel weaves the personal and the political with powerful results.

Japanese literary legend Haruki Murakami questions the current state of masculinity in his new collection of short stories. Murakami's men grapple with the universal existential loneliness of being human, but their fears and anxieties are exacerbated even more by their emotional disconnection from the women in their lives. Murakami's easily-embarrassed stoic men are most comfortable retreating from messy one-on-one confrontations. Reading this book might make you want to shake these characters and say, "Wake up! It's better to risk being hurt than remain alienated from those you love." But, perhaps that's the point—we can learn from their mistakes.

"In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her." This opening sentence sets the scene for this swiftly told love story between Nadia and Saeed, whose relationship is pressurized and contorted by war. In this unnamed city, suspended somewhere between the past, the present, and the future, text messages and one hour of daily internet connection link Nadia and Saeed with the world beyond a home that is disintegrating day by day. First the rich flee, then communication halts, and as the violence escalates they must decide how and when to escape their crumbling homeland. This timely novel brings the frightening reality of war outside your window up close and makes it deeply personal.

The author of the smash-hit The Martian, adapted into the Oscar-nominated blockbuster movie, returns to outer space—this time swapping Mars for the Moon as the setting for this near-future heist saga. Artemis, named after the first inhabited city on the moon and humanity's first colony of the Solar System, is home to Jazz Bashara, a shady small-time smuggler, and the unlikely heroine of the novel. When Jazz decides to seize an irresistible (and criminal) opportunity, she is unwittingly catapulted in a conspiracy that threatens more than she could have ever imagined.

Horowitz is a master of the mystery genre; he created two popular mystery series for the BBC, Foyle'sWar and MidsomerMurders, he's penned two Sherlock Holmes novels, and the best-selling Alex Rider series. Now, he returns to the setting of some his most beloved tales, the quaint English village, with a twist-laden whodunit set within the publishing world. There's a book within the book, also called Magpie Murders, penned by a fictional mystery writer, and it's filled with clues (if you can spot them) from the very first page.

The author of The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns weaves a tale about the disappearance of a white-collar crook, the $100,000 bounty on his whereabouts and two teen girls set on finding him. Sixteen-year-old Aza Holmes sparks a relationship with the criminal's son and hunts for the truth while battling debilitating anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder — a condition shared by Green himself.

Morrigan Crow is cursed, blamed for her every bad event in her town. At 11 years old, she has only one year left to live — until a mysterious patron arrives to sweep her away to Nevermoor, where she'll compete in a tournament to join the Wundrous Society for extraordinarily talented children. The only problem is she has no talents, or so she believes. The novel, the first in a series, has drawn comparisons to Harry Potter and will be adapted for film.

If the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives, as Belgium-born Psychotherapist Perel believes, what happens when infidelity catapults a couple into full-blown crisis mode? Perel's work explores this underlying question. Her 2006 book Mating in Captivity, her two TED talks (viewed close to 20 million times), and recent podcast Where Should We Begin, all urge us to examine the cultural frameworks that forge our romantic expectations. In her opinion, confronting and unearthing the why behind an affair with honesty and courage can steer a relationship back from the brink— possibly towards a place of erotic rediscovery.

Clinton offers one answer to the question that rang collectively from more than half the country on Nov. 9, 2016. The writing is frank, reflective and a piece of modern history.