Amazing Peace - Maya Angelou

This dazzling Christmas poem by Maya Angelou is powerful and inspiring for people of all faiths. Angelou inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. "Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward," she writes, "and speak the word aloud. Peace."

The Girl Who Saved Christmas - Matt Haig

Suitable for Fourth Form Readers

It is Christmas Eve and all is not well. Amelia Wishart is trapped in Mr Creeper's workhouse and Christmas is in jeopardy. Magic is fading. If Christmas is to happen, Father Christmas knows he must find her. With the help of some elves, eight reindeer, the Queen and a man called Charles Dickens, the search for Amelia - and the secret of Christmas - begins . . .

A Boy Called Christmas - Matt Haig

Suitable for Fourth Form Readers

Life was going to change for Nikolas, in ways he could never have imagined. Things were going to happen to him. Good things. Bad things. Impossible things. Father Christmas was not always an old, jolly man with a white beard, he was once just a little boy. A fond, funny and magical tale from award-winning writer Matt Haig that tells the story of how one little boy from Finland came to become Father Christmas.

The Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

Suitable for Fourth Form Readers

IT'S THE NIGHT BEFORE HOGSWATCH AND IT'S TOO QUIET. Where is the big jolly fat man? Why is Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say Ho Ho Ho? The darkest night of the year is getting a lot darker... Susan the gothic governess has got to sort it out by morning, otherwise there won't be a morning. Ever again...

Twelve Nights - Urs Faes

There are few stranger times of year than just after Christmas, when offices are closed, the festivities are mostly over, but the new year has yet to begin. That time is captured beautifully in this gorgeous novella, translated from the original German version published in 2018. In Twelve Nights, Manfred walks alone through the snowy Black Forest in Europe, heading towards his childhood home and contemplating the reasons he and his brother are now estranged. But there is hope here – making it a perfect read for that ponderous, liminal space at the end of the year.

Truman Capote - A Christmas Memory

Selected from across Capote's writing life, these short stories range from nostalgic portraits of childhood to more unsettling works that reveal the darkness beneath the festive glitter. In the Deep South of Capote's youth, a young boy, Buddy, and his beloved maiden 'aunt' Sook forage for pecans and whiskey to bake into fruitcakes, make kites - too broke to buy gifts - and rise before dawn to prepare feasts for a ragged assembly of guests; it is Sook who teaches Buddy the true meaning of good will. In other stories, an unlikely festive miracle, of sorts, occurs at a local drugstore; a lonely woman has a troubling encounter in wintry New York. Brimming with feeling, these sparkling tales convey both the wonder and the chill of Christmas time.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Suitable for Fourth Form Readers

Of all the tales of the Knights of the Round Table, the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is surely the most magical. Here are thrills and enchantment, chivalry and courage, a challenge and a quest. Its hero is the greatest of all King Arthur’€™s knights, Sir Gawain. His adversary is the fearsome Green Knight, who rides into Camelot one New Year’€™s Eve with a challenge that strikes dread into Arthur’€™s court. For Gawain, it is the start of an extraordinary adventure.

... as translated by Simon Armitage (a more challenging read).

This story, first told in the late fourteenth century, is one of the most enthralling, enigmatic and beloved poems in the English language.

Simon Armitage's version is meticulously responsive to the tact, sophistication and dramatic intensity of the original. It is as if, six hundred years apart, two poets set out on a journey through the same mesmeric landscape – physical, allegorical and acoustic – in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true translator.