The BIG Christmas Bookshelf

As the year draws to a close, our team have compiled their personal literary highlights from the past twelve months for your consideration – a bookshelf replete with bold ideas, human stories and the complexities which erupt at the intersection of the two.

From the reverberations of history and memory to the hypothetical nuclear crises of the future, you're sure to find a festive read to suit any taste on BIG's Christmas bookshelf.

Kolkhoze — Emmanuel Carrère

P.O.L., 2025

Kolkhoze opens with the French national tribute paid to Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the controversial historian of Russia and the author’s mother, following her death in 2023. From this moment of public mourning, Carrère widens the frame, weaving the portrait of a complex, divisive figure into a broader meditation on Europe’s political history and the war now reshaping its eastern borders. Carrère does not shy away from the grey areas surrounding her legacy, from her Russia-centric analyses and contested reading of Ukrainian history to the political ambiguities that long fuelled debate. It is also a vivid immersion in Georgia, where Carrère discovers that he is, unexpectedly, a cousin of Salomé Zourabichvili, the country’s fifth president. What makes the book truly compelling is the way it unearths the structural, familial and cultural ties that continue to bind Europe and Russia, despite everything that has happened. As Carrère follows the tangled threads of his family story, he returns to the question of national identity and probes the ambiguities of political commitment. In this book, everyone is a hero, and no one is.

Recommended by Margaux Cassan

The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession — Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello

Verso Books, 2023

In case there weren’t enough adjectives to qualify our epoch as ‘post’ something, political scientists Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger have given us another (and quite important) one: we are living in an era of ‘post left-populism’. After reviewing the intellectual history of the term populism and its American origins, the authors look at how several charismatic leaders, from Alexis Tsipras in Greece to Pablo Iglesias in Spain, sought to embrace the idea of populism and advance a radical left agenda better suited to our atomized and digital societies. Foregoing the traditional class cleavages dear to the Left, they aimed to unite the educated urban middle class with the remnants of the working class – the people versus the elite. But, as Borriello and Jäger write, this might have been an attempt to square a circle: ultimately, the promise of a radical change either failed to win elections, or ended up like Syriza in Greece, ‘in office but not in power’. In the conclusion of their compelling story, the authors argue that ‘one with its age, populism thereby revealed itself as a tragically transitory form of politics’. However, it remains an open question whether this transition is genuinely over in Europe, or whether the populist ‘moment’ will prove longer than they anticipate. As they do not consider any right-wing populist movements in their analysis, this book will not be able to answer that question entirely, but it remains a must-read for anyone interested in the recent comparative history of the radical left in Western Europe.

Recommended by Thomas Laffitte

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi

Profile Books, 2020

An enormous amount of history is crammed into this densely argued book by Rashidi Khalidi, a full 100 years of Palestinian history, from 1917 to 2017. He brilliantly intertwines the story of Palestine’s struggle with his own life and that of his family. The Al-Khalidi family has played a prominent role in shaping Palestine’s fate, with several members serving as diplomats and politicians in the fight for statehood.

Starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and culminating with Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Khalidi identifies six wars that have been waged against the Palestinians. He shows how the Palestinian people and their claims have been systematically erased from diplomacy, politics and media, and how their future has repeatedly been decided in their absence.

Best read with a timeline and a notebook to hand, this book gives the full picture of events that might make uncomfortable reading for some. Nevertheless, it is essential reading. Khalidi consistently distinguishes between the perspectives of authorities, populations and various actors, illuminating the different views of Palestinians throughout the century. Although it is impossible to be comprehensive in 300 pages, Khalidi succeeds in arguing that the struggle in Palestine should be understood not as one between two equal national movements, but rather as 'a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people’.

Recommended by Valeria Santi

Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World — David Marsh

Yale University Press, 2025

Publishing fashion is currently for books that are either bitesize pamphlets you can shove in your pocket or weighty bricks that require wrist support or a sturdy lectern. This tome is of the latter variety, the large number of pages required for the vast canvas that the author covers, not to mention the copious notes and huge list of interview research printed at the back. This is a serious, detailed study of episodes in the European Union’s history since the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that followed. It makes some familiar pitstops along the way – German reunification, the fall of Yeltsin, the rise of Putin, the Euro crisis, Brexit, the Ukraine War and much in between – weaving together the impressions and opinions of the people who were there at the time. It is a rich and informative book even for those familiar with the well-trodden take on the mistakes of Europe past. It is also well told, which can be expected of David Marsh who has a knack for making really difficult material accessible. For the wealth of information and breadth of learning, it is worth a read. However, I did feel a bit cheated that the question of the title is dodged. I guess the answer can be paraphrased as ‘we will have to wait and see’.

Recommended by Alison Howson

If Russia Wins — Carlo Masala

Atlantic Books, 2025

Nothing says Christmas like the threat of nuclear destruction, and this chillingly believable account of how a Russian incursion into the Baltics takes the world to the brink of Armageddon is the perfect stocking-filler. Hopping nervously between capitals and institutions in the run-up to one fateful day in March 2028, the novella’s appeal to the geopolitically-minded is rooted in its procedural realism, thanks to the credentials of its author – Carlo Masala, Professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. If Russia Wins was a bestseller in Germany in 2025, and it upholds a noble tradition of speculative-fiction-as-warning, which is unsurprisingly back in vogue; think Netflix’s A House of Dynamite but in Brussels and Berlin. At precisely one hundred pages, Masala’s concise nightmare scenario is an ideal postprandial read once the Christmas table is cleared – easy to digest, albeit almost impossible to stomach.

Recommended by Martin Leng

Slaughterhouse Five (or the Children’s Crusade) — Kurt Vonnegut

Random House, 1999

Written in 1968 by the late American author Kurt Vonnegut, the semi-biographical Slaughterhouse Five has often been shoe-horned into the science fiction genre. However, for any avid fans of Orwell, Heller or Huxley, this should be top of your reading list.

As proclaimed in the introduction, writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book – they are both inevitable facts of life. There will always be wars and, if not wars, just ‘plain old death’.

The novel is a tale of absurdity, post-traumatic stress from World War II and utopianism of extraterrestrial life, all dressed in fatalist humour. Billy Pilgrim, the central protagonist, becomes ‘unstuck in time’, as the plot follows a non-linear chronology, seamlessly looping through decades. Bearing witness to the firebombing of Dresden in Germany as a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was haunted by the razing of the city, an experience that finds its modern parallel in the scenes of Gaza today.

The Allied bombing of Dresden towards the end of the war, largely populated by civilians and without ‘strategic value’ in military terms, is the epitome of the senselessness of war. Although not explicit in his condemnation of atrocities, Vonnegut’s moralizing questions are clear to any reader. Can the ‘good guys’ do bad things? In modern political thought, many would do well to consult Vonnegut’s science fiction to challenge their own worldviews.

Recommended by Kate O’Riordan

Handing Over the Mic recommended reads

True to the spirit of BIG's podcast, we also asked recent contributors to Handing Over the Mic to add their literary tips to our Christmas bookshelf. Here are some of their highlights.

• Benjamin Labatut is a Chilean author whose writing blurs the boundaries of fiction, non-fiction and historical biography, exploring scientific truth and the inexpressibility of reality in a new hybrid genre. He authored: La Antártica empieza aquí (‘Antarctica starts here’) (2009); Después de la luz (‘After the Light’) (2016); Un verdor terrible (‘When We Cease to Understand the World’) (2020); La piedra de la locura (‘The Stone of Madness’) (2021); and, most recently, The Maniac (2023), in which Labatut tells the story of John von Neumann, the most intelligent human being of the 20th century, delving into the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. His last book gained him the Premio Malaparte 2023 prize and was also shortlisted for the Premio Lattes Grinzane 2024.
  
  
• Chinua Chebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental portrayals of the social and psychological disorientation that comes with the imposition of Western customs and values on traditional African societies. His work focuses on traditional Igbo life during the arrival of missionaries and colonial authorities in his homeland, depicting characters who cannot adapt to the colonial way of life. His novels explore the complexities of postcolonial life, and he was the first to tell the story of contact between the West and Africa from an African perspective. Among various other pieces of literature, he authored several books: Things Fall Apart (1958), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah, (1988). He was honoured by numerous universities and received important awards during his lifetime, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972), the Nigerian National Order of Merit (1979) and the Man Booker International Prize (2007).
  
  
• Mafe Moscoso is an Ecuadorian writer, professor and researcher at BAU, College of Arts and Design in Barcelona. Moscoso's writing moves between ethnography and fiction, with research centred on memory and migration, experimental ethnography and anti-racist and feminist studies and practices. Her book La Santita (‘The Little Saint’) (2024) explores worlds where Andean cosmologies, popular culture and collective memory intersect, dissolving boundaries between body and spirit, life and death, reality and magic. It weaves together ancestral violence, loss and resistant imaginaries, creating a literature that calls forgotten identities and landscapes back into being.