Christmas

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Perfect Gift Books for Christmas 2025

Christmas stack of titles featured in our Christmas gift guide tied up with ribbon and other festive items.

With Christmas fast approaching (seriously, how is it that time again already?) we’ve rounded up our top bookish gift suggestions for all your family and friends, because who doesn’t love getting books at Christmas!

We’ve only scraped the surface here (otherwise you’d have been stuck reading this right up until the big day) but we’re sure you’ll find plenty of inspiration to get you started. And if you’re interested in what else we have to offer, our Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry pages are ideal for browsing.

Oh, and did we mention we’re offering £10 off orders over £30 right up until the end of December? Use the code Xmas25 when checking out!

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Perfect Gifts for…

Can’t-put-a-good-novel-downers

This cover shows the clock tower in Aberystwyth standing ominously tall in the midst of a violent storm. A young woman with an umbrella walks along the promenade. The text reads: Storm, Alex Hubbard.
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This cover shows a dark lino print image of a crow foregrounded against the distant skyline of industrial Swansea. The text reads: The Forger's Ink. Jo Mazelis.
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This cover shows has a dark background and shows an old country house alone, surrounded by moths and branches carrying blood red berries. The text reads Sugar Hall. Tiffany Murray.
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Film, TV & Pop Culture Buffs

This cover shows a wide shot image of people in a truck filming a white car driving into the distance beneath a bright blue sky. The text reads Film & TV Places of Wales. Celyn Jones and Frances Turpin.
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This cover is illustrated in Efa Lois' signature style. It shows five of the witches from the book framed by dandelions, mushrooms and animals. The text reads: Gwrachod Cymru Welsh Witches. Efa Lois.
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This cover shows an abstract painting of two figures, one wearing a shirt and tie, against a pink background. The text reads: Significant Wow. Emily Cotterill.
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History Geeks

This cover shows a drone shot of a large derelict building being taken over by nature. The text reads: Vanished Wales. Carwyn Jones.
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This cover has a blue background, framing a picture of a neolithic stone plinth propped up by concrete blocks. The text reads: Wales As Is. David Hurn. Essay by Richard King.
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This cover shows an eerie photograph of a house mostly in shadow beneath a dusky sky. The text reads: Murder on Ynys Mon The Anglesey Crossbow Killing, Sion Tecwyn and Meic Parry
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Poetry Lovers

This cover shows a blurred image of a women in a 1920s style black dress standing in front of a patterned wall. The text reads: Hotel Amour. Deryn Rees-Jones
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This cover shows a graphic of a flying swallow in peachy, orange against a bright pink background. The text reads Cling Film Bethany Handley.
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This cover shows an intricate collage of personal household objects overlapping in tones of blue. The text reads: The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning. Alison Binney.
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Nature & Outdoorsy Types

This cover shows a vibrant illustration of Three Cliffs Bay with a runner in bright leggings stepping into the foreground. The text reads: Wild Running South Wales. Natalie Ann Holborow.
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This cover shows a lino cut print of a jagged seed head bursting against a blue sky. The text reads: The Storm's Flora, Laura Wainwright
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This cover shows an illustration of a grey heron standing on the side of an estuary, the purple heather stretching out in the distance. The text reads: This Stolen Land A People's History of the Gwent Levels. Marsha O'Mahony.
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Foodies

This cover shows a vibrant bowl of food surrounded by colourful ingredients against a rich blue background. The text reads: The Occasional Vegan, Sarah Philpott
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This cover shows a flat-lay photo of a vibrant bowl of pasta against a neutral table cloth. The text read: The Seasonal Vegan, Sarah Philpott
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Thank you for supporting independent publishing this Christmas!

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Friday Poem – ‘Going to Liverpool’ by Sheenagh Pugh

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Going to Liverpool’ by Sheenagh Pugh from the anthology Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After The Beatles. Congratulations to Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics which won Waterstones Book of the Year 2021.

Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After the Beatles. Edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley.

January 1963. ‘Please, Please Me’ by The Beatles shoots to number one. So begins a new era, in which one band transforms the face of music, youth and popular culture. Taking in everything from the music, their influence, the way we lived then and the way we live now, Newspaper Taxis is a response to the Beatles’ creativity and capacity to influence successive generations. Beatles fans young and old will want this anthology to add to their collection.

GOING TO LIVERPOOL I am a middle-aged woman travelling on business and I’m going to Liverpool, where I’ll take time out to visit Albert Dock and the museum where my youth is preserved. The fashions I followed, the songs I knew by heart, the faces that convulsed my own into screams and sobs, they’ll all be there. I’m going to Liverpool, and it is autumn. The fields outside Leominster lie in stubble, the leaves of Ludlow’s trees are jaundiced and flushed with the fever that says they’re finished. The ticket collector said Thank you, Madam. My daughter’s grown up and my mother’s dead, and between the pages of the notebook where I’m writing this I keep a yellowed ticket to a match, a picture of an actor, Edwin Morgan’s reply to my fan letter, and I’m going to Liverpool because I’m the kind that always will. Sheenagh Pugh

Newspaper Taxis is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Browse the Seren Christmas Gift Guide for more gift recommendations for your loved ones.

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Friday Poem ­– ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

100 Poems to Save the Earth edited by Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans.

Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have. 

Thirlmere After we lit the last candle the gales couldn't hold us any more. Along the lane the walls had begin to slump, water sluicing through them green as grass, but we drove through anyway and out into the valley. The fields were polished flat. Trees were hung with drooping ropes of fleece that caught in the breeze like kudzu. Banks of shale sprawled draining across the roads, and the sky was open, dizzying and blue, tall into the air above the crowns of our heads, and the slate face of the lake was the same as always. Lakes survive any flood, lie oblique in their hollows, streaked with the half-truths of glimpsed reflections. The birds were only then beginning to sound. All across the fields the fallen trees were burning.

100 Poems to Save the Earth is available on the Seren website: £12.99

Rhiannon Hooson’s collection The Other City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Extract from ‘The Owl House’ by Daniel Butler

If you’re still looking for a last minute gift, you can’t go wrong with Daniel Butler’s new book The Owl House. This pastoral exploration of mid-Wales is beautifully observed, full of evocative observations that can only have been lived to have been accrued. Here is a wintry extract from the chapter ‘Weather’.

Daniel Butler has lived in the Cambrian Mountains near Rhayader for twenty-five years, absorbing the world around him and charting its changes slow and rapid. His passion for the natural world was compounded when two wild birds, barn owls, nested at his farm. Through charting his relationship with the birds, he embarks on a pastoral exploration of his locale, rich as it is in wildlife of all kinds. His new book The Owl House is a rich and vivid portrait of one of the most remote and sparsely populated areas of Britain, broad in its horizons yet full of fascinating detail. The perfect gift for any lover of the natural world and mid-Wales.

…

Winter bird activity is not just about survival. I used to think the breeding season was a spring phenomenon, but for many creatures the concept seems to lurk as a constant background urge.

Even in the depths of winter there are signs of what’s to come. Mistle thrushes start to gang up towards the end of August in family groups which later join together to form small flocks. They give off their instantly recognisable football rattle calls as they bounce through the air above the fields, but by the end of the year these groups have disbanded. Instead of looking for the security of a flock to evade predators, the males are beginning to get a head start on next year’s breeding season. They do this by searching for a berry-laden food source. Indeed, the bird’s name comes from its fondness for mistletoe, that strange shrub, a living green sphere that hangs in bunches from the apparently lifeless limbs of oaks and apple trees. A glance at its fleshy white berries and strange green leaves and it isn’t difficult to see why the druids apparently venerated it as a sign of life in the depths of winter. The oak or crab apple host would be no more than a black skeleton, yet its passenger would appear the embodiment of life. Mistletoe is rare in Radnorshire, although it is common enough a few miles away in the acres of Herefordshire cider orchards.

My mistle thrushes are drawn mainly by the lure of another tree beloved by pagans and one which is, if anything, even more associated with Christmas. There is a particularly splendid and always well-endowed holly halfway down the lane. The berries grow slowly all autumn, green and hard and invisible among the glossy spiked leaves until they burst into view by turning red seemingly overnight.

By the time I go to collect a few decorative sprigs in early December, there will already be a resident mistle thrush. His favourite perch is near the crown to gain a good vantage point. He sits here like a miser crouched over his hoard, jealously watching for thieves or rivals which may try to steal his crown. At my approach he flies off giving his characteristic rattling calls of alarm towards the row of neighbouring pines. He perches there and with binoculars I can just make him out staring warily at me, filled with terrors that his jewelled kingdom might be raided in his absence.

He is not always in the holly, however, sometimes he is lurking among the ‘sallies’ (goat willows) that straggle along the banks of the nearby stream. This probably indicates the proximity of a sparrowhawk or goshawk, and he’s waiting for the danger to pass. Normally he’s a pugnacious fellow, fiercely defending his scarlet treasure from a host of increasingly hungry thieves. His greatest ire is reserved for sexual rivals, but he will defend his prize from smaller redwings and fieldfares, doves and even wood pigeons. He does this by intimidation rather than actual violence, flying at them only to veer off at the last second. At stake is not just a precious food supply at the leanest time of year, but the implications this has for the breeding season ahead. The fatter and fitter he is at winter’s end, the better his chances of attracting the best mate, for any bird that can finish the lean months in good condition is clearly a good breeding prospect. So he spends the winter fighting for food and sex.

By Christmas tawny owls are also beginning to stake out breeding territories, hooting out their instantly recognisable ‘toowhit, too-woo’ calls and at about the same point the garden robins become increasingly evident. The clichéd seasonal card image of a robin on a snow-covered spade handle as a representation of the season of goodwill and peace couldn’t be further from the truth. These are testosterone-pumped pugilists, determined to fight all rivals. At first they are driven by the need to protect their food supplies and territories and will pick fights with any other robin – even potential future mates. Once, after a heavy snow fall, I was looking at the crowds of finches, tits and nuthatches hanging on the feeders outside the kitchen window when my eye was caught by flying puffs of snow on the back lawn. Two robins were scrapping in the soft powder, bouncing into view as they pecked and kicked in fury, only to sink almost out of sight whenever they paused. No sooner had the last tiny crystals fallen back, however, than the furious tussle would resume.

…

The Owl House is available on the Seren website £12.99 or can be found in bookshops nationwide. Find your nearest independent bookshop using the Books Council of Wales or Bookseller Association shop finders.

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Short Story of the Month – ‘All Through the Night’ by Angela Graham

Our new short story of the month is ‘All Through the Night’ by Angela Graham from her debut short story collection A City Burning.

A man looks back to the night his marriage reached its tipping-point on a cliff-top in west Wales.

A city burns in a crisis − because the status quo has collapsed and change must come. Every value, relationship and belief is shaken and the future is uncertain.

In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. On the threshold of their futures each must make a choice: how to live in this new ‘now’. 

The story ‘All Through the Night’ was first published in the Irish journal Crannóg which nominated it for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2019. 

This is an excerpt, read the full story for FREE on the Seren website here.

All Through the Night

I look back now with a kind of dread, yet dread is about the future, about what’s going to happen, not what has already happened. So I dread…? The memory of pain.
          I never thought of myself as a man given to gestures. Imagination I do have, but I tend to keep it to myself.
          I remember the road: the little road under the starlight that summer. It was the year Mam and Dad sold the farm. I didn’t want it. They kept the farmhouse and the little bwthyn that had been the kernel of the homestead. You and I had used it for years already for holidays with the kids. They loved its thick walls and deep window-ledges.
          At Clogwyn Uchel, on the very edge of Wales, the roads are dark (some of them are tracks, really) and the stars sort of spread themselves out overhead, display themselves, with a careless glamour; or like something much more homely, like sugar spilt across a slate, but up there, up above. A sprinkling of sugar overhead. Very confusing if you thought about it too much. And higher into the sky – it’s hard to describe! – there’s a hazy cloud of them.  Growing up at Clogwyn Uchel and I never bothered to learn much about them. Anyway, the stars do what they do whether we notice them or not. They’re not waiting for our attention.
          On a clear night like that one they shed enough light to see your way and the chalky ground of the lane helps. It’s a glimmering path up to the bwthyn, reflecting light from far, far above. Sometimes it even seems to me as though a bit of the sky has dropped to earth because the little white stones are like a rough and tumble Milky Way between the hedges.
          You walked ahead of me, Mari. Blindly, I thought. Or like someone who’d been dazzled by something. Your feet took you.
          Your mind? Numbed.
          Probably. We all have to do so much guess-work about each other! What is she feeling?  What will she do next? What does she want?
          “Do you love him?” I called out. But you didn’t stop, or look back, or speak. I’m sure you heard me. You went on, into the little house.
          I couldn’t. I walked around it to where the sea suddenly presents itself. A shock! Always. Always that shiver at finding yourself on the edge of a cliff. Acres of water ahead in a dark mass. The endlessness of the sea. It doesn’t stop. It goes about its business, rushing and crushing, floating boats, flexing itself. That night it was shuddering.
          The stars. Some flung themselves down the sky. Mad bastards. Most looked on in a dignified way, blinking mildly at this recklessness.  And I thought of the song. Its beautiful tune.
          Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant
          Ar hyd y nos.

          Ar hyd y nos. All through the night.
          Nothing like the crappy English version.  Sickly-sweet, that.  And boring. “Soft the drowsy hours are creeping… visions of delight revealing… hill and vale in slumber steeping”. And the stars don’t get a look-in! Not a mention. You pointed that out to me. When you were learning Welsh. “How come…?” you asked. You were always asking that. “Why is the verb here? Why do I have to say…?” Whatever.
          And I’d say, “It just is, Mari. I don’t know why. Ask your teacher, cariad.  Gwyn knows all that stuff.”
          Yes, he did, didn’t he?

…

Finish reading ‘All Through the Night’ on the Seren website here.

A City Burning is available on the Seren website £9.99

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