The best way to raid the shops

This Christmas, the much-plugged big sellers are all uninspired TV knockoffs - Clarkson, Nigella, Richard Hammond, Jamie & Co.

Currently selling best, shifting over 90,000 units last week, is Russell Brand's gabby and mucky addiction memoir, My Booky Wook (Hodder, £18.99), which performs the outrageous cheat on its readers of suddenly announcing on the last page that he's saving any description of his years of fame and the other celebrities he has met for the follow-up. On the other hand, it does offer Brand's timely description of the way he thinks yuletide festivities should be - just like when your gerbil unexpectedly has a litter of babies. "I treasure the memory of these tiny, pink, squirming chipolatas. It was miraculous - like how Christmas should feel." So now we know.

This year, none of the gimmick books has really caught on in the timehonoured Truss or Schott fashion. The nearest to a surprise "sleeper hit" is a collection of mnemonics, I Before E (Except After C) by Judy Parkinson (O'Mara, £9.99), taken home by more than 30,000 shoppers last week, so possibly appearing soon in a stocking near you.

You can do better. Here's a quick list of titles, a final sifting of favourites that you can't go wrong with as gifts.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Cape, £12.99). Short, gripping, beautifully written, it tackles a surprising subject - a couple's devastating experience of sexual fiasco on honeymoon in Dorset in 1962 and the consequences that flow from that for the rest of their lives. The paperback is released on 3 January - but it's well worth owning in hardback still.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (Faber/Profile, £10.99). A perfect little story about the Queen becoming an avid reader, after making an unintended visit to a mobile library, with considerable repercussions for herself and the monarchy.

There's an underlying seriousness about the importance of books - but it's also full of great one-liners. "'Exploded?' said the Queen. 'But it was Anita Brookner'." Any reader at all, commoner or not, would love this.

The Ghost by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, £18.99). Whipped out soon after Blair's resignation, this is a thriller with a big political punch. An unnamed ghostwriter is commissioned to write the memoirs of Britain's former prime minister, "Adam Lang" - after the previous recruit has mysteriously died. He soon uncovers more than he had bargained for. Not just a satire on Blair, The Ghost is as much Harris's reflection on the mutual dependencies and shared dishonesties of politicians and journalists.

Although it's a quick read, it deserves long thought.

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke (Orion, £12.99). James Lee Burke's stylised Southern thrillers, starring his alter ego detective James Robicheaux, are always addictive - but this novel takes his work to another level, tackling the social breakdown revealed when Hurricane Katrina devastated his beloved New Orleans in 2005.

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds (Cape, £16.99). It's a happy year in which there's a new graphic novel from Posy Simmonds.

This is a wonderfully observant and droll updating of Thomas Hardy following the misadventures of a group of incomers and natives in a Dorset village.

Just a treat.

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 by John Richardson (Cape, £30). Volume three of the definitive biography of this endlessly fascinating man - Richardson writes, said Brian Sewell, "with such fluency, simplicity and clarity that his knowledge and illuminating wisdom are very lightly borne".

Letters of Ted Hughes selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber, £30). This vast collection of letters has been carefully edited to display Hughes to the best advantage (and was duly reviewed everywhere in adulatory terms almost entirely by other Faber authors). Nevertheless, it is, when Hughes is not expounding his batty theories about Shakespeare and shamanism, a fascinating read and contains some truly great letters, particularly those to his children. A genuine addition to modern literature.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (Granta, £18.99). One of a fine crop of natural-history books that includes Richard Mabey's Beechcombings and Roger Deakin's Wildwood. Macfarlane sets out to discover what wilderness there is left in these islands, sleeping out in all weathers, finding at last that wilderness exists on the smallest scale too. Lyrical, inspiring writing.

Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings (HarperPress, £25). Perhaps Sir Max is on more unfamiliar ground here than he was in his superb study of the end of the war in Europe, Armageddon, but nonetheless nobody writes more driving narrative history and this one's a corker that will delight any armchair warrior.

Klimt edited by Alfred Weidinger (Prestel, £89). The desirable artbook of the year, huge and splendidly illustrated. Classic.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Classics, £20). A handsome edition of a new translation by the duo working their way through the canon of Russian classics with scrupulous fidelity to the originals.

Paperback. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador, £7.99). A father and son wander across post-apocalyptic America, a land without a future, struggling to stay warm and find scraps of food, while being hunted by the few other survivors, who have turned cannibal. This novel sounds ridiculously unenticing - but it's a masterpiece, exquisitely written, wildly moving, forcing the reader to reconsider all kinds of assumptions.

Dickens on Audiobook. The excellent audiobook division of Naxos continues to bring out wonderful unabridged readings of Dickens, as well as other writers such as Beckett. New titles this year include Our Mutual Friend, superbly read by David Timson on 28 discs, costing £85, and Great Expectations, read by Anton Lesser, on 15 discs, at £50. These are luxuries that anybody who enjoys hearing books would love, however many times they have already read Dickens.

Food: Week In, Week Out by Simon Hopkinson (Quadrille, £20). Collected newspaper columns but none the less desirable for that. Hopkinson's previous cookbook, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, published back in 1994, was voted most useful cookery book of all time. His recipes work. A better choice than any of the TV-driven cookbooks that are selling so well.

Drink: Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2008 (Mitchell Beazley, £9.99). Simply the best concise wine reference and a model of how to marshal quantities of fact and evaluation into a compact volume. Every interested wine-drinker needs the latest edition every year.

Laughs: Borat: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan/Minor Nation of US and A by Borat Sagdiyev (Boxtree, £14.99) Silly, rude, funny, for the dirty teenager in everyone, not just dirty teenagers.