AS NORMAN MAILER remarked, on Desert Island Discs, when reprimanded for choosing a spliff as his luxury item: “Well, there we are. In trouble again.”

It doesn't take much to get a writer in trouble. Take A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (Picador, £16.99/offer £15.29), in which V.S. Naipaul sets out “the writing to which I was exposed during my career”. This includes the novels of Anthony Powell, whom he regarded as a great writer “because I had not examined his work”. When he did, and contrasted Powell's “kind of writing” with his own, the chapter of this memoir that resulted, portraying Powell as a dull man and writer offended some Powell partisans and provoked jibes about Naipaul's own vanity.

But writers should be ruthless:most critics have found Günter Grass's confessional memoir, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, £18.99/ £17.09), sensational. In it Grass finally comes clean about his participation, in 1944, in the Waffen-SS.

Pascal noted that trouble comes to those who can't sit quietly alone in a room. Orhan Pamuk, who did stay home in Istanbul writing novels, should have been safe, but offended some Turkish political sensibilities. Other Colours: Essays and a Story (Faber, £20/£18) is a personal selection of writing from 25 years that wittily presents “ideas, images and fragments of life that have still not made their way into one of my novels”.

Celebrity festive favourites

Britain's best-loved personalities tell the Times what they will be reading at Christmas

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

• The Times Christmas choice: crime

• The Times Christmas choice: history

• The Times Christmas choice: audiobooks

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: children aged 2-10

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

• The Times Christmas choice: art

• The Times Christmas choice: memoirs and autobiographies

• The Times Christmas choice: graphic novels

The character and reputation of Ted Hughes is still under construction by critics and readers, for whom Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber, £30/£27), will be grist to a slow-grinding mill. Here, Hughes's spontaneous character emerges in private writings that deal not only with the notable tragedies in his life and the great themes of his poetry, but with simple joys such as fishing and farming.

Hughes has things to say about England and religion that may provoke impassioned comment, but nothing like the furore that has greeted The Islamist by Ed Husain (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54), the poster boy for all those concerned at the rise of extremist political Islam. This absorbing memoir, dramatic and candid about his youthful vainglory, has been influential as a reassurance that some Muslim fundamentalists and literalists can be “redeemed” from radical religion by intellectual and spiritual development.

Less controversial, but no less intensely felt, is The Presence by Dannie Abse (Hutchinson, £15.99/ £14.39) which movingly describes the deep grief and enduring love that he felt after the death of his beloved wife Joan in a car accident in 2005.

The clashing cultures of England, Ireland and Argentina are the quick-running currents that drive Silver River: A Family Story by Daisy Goodwin (Fourth Estate, £16.99/£15.29) from peasantry and poverty to high society and fast living. Goodwin's wry style may derive, at least partly, from the dry, aphoristic, keenly intelligent and commonsensical tone of Katherine Whitehorn, the doyenne of columnists. In Selective Memory: An Autobiography (Virago, £18.99/ £17.09), she is frank about her marriage to the alcoholic writer Gavin Lyall and her mothering of two sons, activities that she combined with journalism from the last days of Picture Post to her heyday at The Observer.

New journalism, in the style of the rock writers of the NME and other music sheets helped to form the taste of the poet Lavinia Greenlaw. The Importance of Music to Girls (Faber, £15.99/£14.39) is a candid memoir of adolescence, starting in the 1960s, from pop to punk, in which Greenlaw dances and sings her young life.

By then, the days of musical theatre were a faded memory. They are revived in The Letters of Noël Coward, edited by Barry Day (Methuen, £25/£22.50), a selection of confusingly arranged correspondence, much new and very luvvie, with Binkie, Bunkie and Bonkie, and Gertie and Garbo and everyone else who apparently never had proper names.

A nation, as much as an individual, has a life and the Scots have always been prolix, so Scotland: The Autobiography, edited by Rosemary Goring (Viking, £25/£22.50), is a wonderfully opinionated chronological memoir, from Roman times to Devolution.

Bestsellers 2007

1. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
Black Swan, £7.99
Britain's favourite American recalls his childhood years in 1950s Iowa.

2. Don't Tell Mummy by Toni Maguire
Harper, £6.99

3. The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay
Arrow, £7.99

4. Marley and Me by John Grogan
Hodder, £7.99

5. Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay
Harper, £7.99

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