NOVELS

Probably the easiest option this year, because a horde or literary heavyweights got busy. But the book of the season is by the lesser known Mark Haddon. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time (Jonathon Cape) will keep children quiet during the sugar rushes of Christmas Day, while the adults brag that they've already read the story of an autistic boy who hunts the pitchfork-wielding killer of the neighbour's dog. The Christmas card should read: 'This really should have won the Booker Prize.'

The Great Fire (Barnes & Noble) by Shirley Hazzard is set to be the next tome of taste, having just won the US National Book award, for her first novel in 23 years. For something with a little more pace, how about the newly released John Le Carre, Absolute Friends (Hodder and Stoughton)?

If you want something that gets the jump on writers appearing at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2004 in March, look for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace (Alfred Knopf) or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (Sceptre), which is about to be released. The memoir of Hong Kong-based advertising executive Shane Weaver, Blacktown (Random House) is also worth a look. Weaver had a tortured childhood in the tough western suburbs of Sydney before earning a university scholarship, winning Australia's light-middleweight boxing title and falling into a life of drugs and alcohol.

THE MISCELLANIES

The lazy, all-purpose choice. Schott's Original Miscellany (Bloomsbury) was the year's publishing marvel. Photographer and designer Ben Schott looks to have another with the recently released Schott's Food And Drink Miscellany. Also look out for Schott's 2004 Calendar Box. But with a sporting miscellany by Schott already announced for next November, other useless-information tomes have arrived - just in time for a Christmas miracle if you're looking gifts with wide reach. Sanctuary has just delivered to Hong Kong a stack of Fotheringham's Sporting Trivia by Will Fotheringham and Sullivan's Music Trivia by Paul Sullivan. They're easy to spot - look for the same beige cover as Schott's efforts. And they're even easier to read.

Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything (Random House) is slightly more concentrated than Schott but just as popular. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto could have taken 175 concepts that enhanced humanity and turned them into trivial reading. Instead, he helps make sense of them. Ideas That Changed The World (Dorling Kindersley) is for the person who likes the trivia book itself to be obscure. If reading the arcane is less interesting than buying it, look for India Knight's guide to working the credit card, The Shops (Viking). Also just out is Fairchild and Gallagher's 'Where to Wear' series of how to shop in Italy, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Paris. Or you could just wait for the goods to be copies and buy the new edition of Shop In Shenzhen (Roundtree Publications) by Ellen McNally.

FOOD AND DRINK

Two British novelists are transforming beverages into best-sellers. Julian Barnes has The Pedant In The Kitchen (Guardian Books), while Iain Banks went for a more traditional literary tipple: whisky. His Raw Spirit is a search for Scotland's perfect dram. But if you'd rather place your faith in a celebrity cook, try Iron Chef (Andrew McMeel), which has recipes from the cult Japanese show of the same name.

HONG KONG AND CHINA Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek And The China He Lost (Free Press) by former South China Morning Post editor Jonathan Fenby is just out, as is The Girl In The Golden House, a novel of sexual awakening in Hong Kong by former Hong Kong University education professor John Biggs. Hong Kong University Press this year released City Voices, a collection of post-war fiction. The New Year will bring the first English translation of Before Mao: The Untold Story Of Li Lisan And The Creation Of Communist China by Patrick Lescot, the French editor-in-chief of news service Agence France-Presse.

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR 'I had no interest in writing a traditional autobiography,' says Sting in Broken Music. Instead, he explores what he calls 'specific moments', such as early mornings delivering milk with his father. So, nothing on tantric sex or those embezzled millions, but it's honest, entertaining, and he wrote it all by himself.

Amy Tan's The Opposite Of Fate, is a collection of e-mails, essays and speeches - great for those who want to know more about the woman who defined Chinese-American literature.

Madam Secretary by Madeleine Albright (Miramax) is everything that Hillary Clinton's Living History ought to have been. The Czech immigrant who became the highest ranking woman in the history of US government speaks her mind about the Clintons, Colin Powell, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Il among others. Less well known but equally intriguing is Hilary Spurling's The Girl From The Fiction Department (Penguin) - a memoir of Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's wife for the last 14 weeks of his life and the model for Julia in 1984.

If the ideal subject for a biography is a long life lived to the full then Martha Gellhorn, the glamorous reporter who covered conflicts from the Spanish civil war to the US invasion of Panama, fits the bill. Her biography by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus) is sensitive and passionate, and reveals Gellhron's dark side.

HISTORY

For pure self-indulgent pleasure, The Meaning of Everything: The Story Of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (OUP) tells the story of James Murray, a Victorian schoolteacher who knew everything (in the days when it was still possible to do so) and who edited the great dictionary from 1879 to 1915. Mountains Of The Mind (Granta) by Robert Macfarlane has just won The Guardian First Book Award. It's a history of how perceptions of mountains have changed over the past three centuries. Buy it for the spouses of climbers or for anyone who can't understand why sane people subject themselves to such horrific ordeals just to go up and down a hill.

For the politically incorrect, In Praise Of Nepotism by Adam Bellow (Doubleday) defends the age-old practice of looking out for one's own as 'both natural and necessary'. While Niall Ferguson in Empire (Basic Books) argues that the British Empire did a lot of good and prevented evil. For more recent events, The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone) is all the background you'll ever need on the conflict. In 700 pages, Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf have collected the best journalism about the events leading from the Gulf war in 1991 to this year's invasion.

TRAVEL

There have been two trends in travel this year: books that cover everything - the whole world, all of it - and books that home in on one specific, obscure corner of the world. Go for the jugular with Jan Morris' omnibus, A Writer's World: Travels 1950-2000 (Faber), in which she takes you across the planet, witnessing such seminal moments as the Eichmann trial, the first ascent of Everest, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Hong Kong handover.

The Encyclopedia Of Exploration To 1800 (Hordern House), compiled by Raymond John Howgago, is a comprehensive marvel about the history of travel that will take you until next Christmas to finish. At the other end of the scale, Peter Matthiessen goes to Antarctica in The End Of The Earth (National Geographic). With 14,000 people now visiting annually, it's becoming a bona-fide tourist destination. And Byron Rogers has tracked down some of the weirdest places and people in Wales in The Bank Manager And The Holy Grail (Aurum Press).

Closer to home, Sun Shuyun retraces the journey of a seventh-century Chinese monk, Xuanzang, across the Silk Road to India in Ten Thousand Miles Without A Cloud (Flamingo), while charming you with memories of her grandmother.