JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

If you’re looking for presents for friends, colleagues, family, consider something time-warping, reality-bending, brain-expanding yet extremely affordable: Books. Bad as it was, 2016 doesn’t have to be the beginning of the end of civilization. If we all take up reading, there’s hope.

For readers who love a clever adultery-and-revenge plot, from the author of Atonement and The Cement Garden. The narrator is even younger than Briony Tallis or the kids in The Cement Garden: He’s an embryo.

For readers who fell in love with The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay a decade ago and have been waiting for Chabon to revisit the territory.

Short stories by a master who is finally getting her due. Famous fan: Pedro Almodovar.

Recently filmed by Martin Scorsese, an exploration of religious belief that should appeal to the faithful and to atheists.

A domestic drama set during an international crisis, by the author of Everything Is Illuminated.

The source of last year’s forbidden love drama Carol (by Todd Haynes, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), by the woman who invented The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The controversial novel about a traditional Muslim president winning the French election in 2022. (The novel was on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the day of the shooting. Was that the point at which everything started going to hell?) I do not like Houellebecq but feel compelled to read his novels.

For readers who like their prose rich, with the consistency of molten lava.

In Modiano’s novels, the protagonists are always trying to remember something they forgot, or forgot that they forgot, or forgot that they remember. It’s just as well they are short. But no one evokes mood and place better—one page and you’re in the grottier sections of Paris. You could argue that Modiano writes the same novel over and over again, but he forgot that he’d already written them.

When people say, “That’s so French,” this novel is what they mean. If your friend already has the Hermes scarf and the box of Ladurée macarons, this should complete the ambience.

A particularly frantic day in the life of a successful illustrator who has disappeared into motherhood and domesticity. Sounds like her previous novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and that is a good thing.

Race in America has never been a more incendiary topic, and this novel about escaping slavery is perfectly-timed.

All titles available at National Bookstores.

A bibliophile, from Bibiliomania, the Dark Desire for Books That Infected Europe in the 1800s.