Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect gift

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.

The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change

Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.