Book round-up

11 perfect books to gift this Mother's Day


Words by Bloomsbury | Apr 12 2024

Give the gift of their next great read! From home chefs to fiction fanatics and beyond, we have the perfect book to show how much you care this Mother's Day.

1. Tough Broad

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl, a funny, inspiring, deeply researched exploration into the science and psychology of the outdoors and our place in it as we age.

Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren't women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age?

2. A Year Full of Pots

A Year Full of Pots overbrims with year-round inspiration, planting ideas and expert advice from Sarah Raven, the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Year Full of Flowers and A Year Full of Veg.

Accessible and rewarding, growing flowers in pots is a simple and enjoyable way to enhance any space, from small city plots to huge gardens. Get the pots right and your garden will take on a cheerful energy of its own. They are the bubbles in the champagne, the cherries on the cake; the final flourish in making a garden beautiful.

3. A Life in Light

From the bestselling author of Women Rowing North and Reviving Ophelia-a memoir in essays reflecting on radiance, resilience, and the constantly changing nature of reality.

In her luminous new memoir in essays, Mary Pipher-as she did in her New York Times bestseller Women Rowing North-taps into a cultural moment, to offer wisdom, hope, and insight into loss and change. Drawing from her own experiences and expertise as a psychologist specializing in women, trauma, and the effect of our culture on our mental health, she looks inward in A Life in Light to what shaped her as a woman, one who has experienced darkness throughout her life but was always drawn to the light.

4. A Table Full of Love

From the beloved author of A Table for Friends, more than 100 nourishing recipes to bring people together-and a culinary love letter to cooking and eating with heart.

For Skye McAlpine, there's no better way to say “I love you” than with food. With recipes collected over a lifetime of meals prepared and shared, and with sections like Comfort, Seduce, Spoil, Nourish, and Cocoon, A Table Full of Love teaches you the culinary love language to say it, too.

5. I Must be Dreaming

#1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast's new graphic narrative, exploring the surreal nighttime world inside her mind-and untangling one of our most enduring human mysteries: dreams.

Ancient Greeks, modern seers, Freud, Jung, neurologists, poets, artists, shamans-humanity has never ceased trying to decipher one of the strangest unexplained phenomena we all experience: dreaming. Now, in her new book, Roz Chast illustrates her own dream world, a place that is sometimes creepy but always hilarious, accompanied by an illustrated tour through “Dream-Theory Land” guided by insights from poets, philosophers, and psychoanalysts alike. Illuminating, surprising, funny, and often profound, I Must Be Dreaming explores Roz Chast's newest subject of fascination-and promises to make it yours, too.

6. BAKE

The ultimate baking book from internationally beloved baker Paul Hollywood, judge of The Great British Baking Show.

In BAKE, Paul Hollywood shares his best ever recipes for classic bakes: cakes, biscuits and cookies, breads and flatbreads, pizza and doughnuts, pastries and pies, and showstopping desserts. From classic cakes like Victoria Sandwich and Chocolate Fudge Cake, through brilliant breads like foolproof Sourdough, to savoury and sweet pastries like Sausage Rolls and Danish Pastries, these are the only recipes you'll need to create perfectly delicious bakes time and time again.

7. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

The Korean smash hit available for the first time in English, a slice-of-life novel for readers of Matt Haig's The Midnight Library and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of AJ Fikry.

Yeongju is burned out. She did everything she was supposed to: go to school, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. In a leap of faith, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighborhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster-and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju-they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.

8. Bliss on Toast

Avocado, summer tomatoes & tapenade rocket on olive bread
Bubble & squeak with hollandaise on fried bread
Falafel, edamame & red pepper hummus on flatbread
Grilled chicken tikka with yoghurt on naan
Smoked salmon, wasabi & avocado on granary bread

Bliss on Toast is as much a toolkit for quick fridge-raids as it is inspiration for seasonal delights. With 82 years' experience of good eating and 60 years of cooking, writing about and judging food, there is no-one who better knows what makes a meal bliss than Dame Prue Leith.

9. The House of Doors

From the bestselling author of The Garden of Evening Mists, a spellbinding novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.

10. The Island of Missing Trees

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

11. Float Up, Sing Down

Laird Hunt's masterful story collection capturing one summer's day in the Indiana community where the beloved National Book Award Finalist Zorrie bloomed.

Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to the Galaxy Swirl, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.

Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.

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