Book ideas for Christmas 2025

A round-up of this year's best cookbooks

Hello and welcome to this year’s cookbook round-up.

As ever, it’s not a ‘best’ or ‘top ten’ list – both flawed concepts. Consider this, instead, a gentle review (or directory?) of a sizeable tranche of this year’s crop, with some personal favourites highlighted.

Hopefully you will (a) enjoy reading it; and (b) use it as a prompt to check-out and perhaps pick-up some books you’d seen but forgotten, and others that you hadn’t known about until now. It should be helpful for gift and wish lists.

What else to note? It’s UK focused. But hey, we make good books (and the best covers), and most are out and available in North America, Australasia and other regions (or will be soon).

Also a warning: this is unapologetically long. If you are reading on email then tap the relevant link to unclip it. Alternatively read it in browser (link top right) or the Substack app. Also, start, do something else, come back to it when ready for more!

Each book title is linked to the relevant Amazon page. For trans…