Albertine Holiday Gift Guide 2025
As the year winds down, our team is here with some suggestions for beautiful and unusual gifts for the book-loving people in your life.
Reading List
In the heart of the Landes forest, in the intimacy of a summer night, a seemingly ordinary mother confides a secret to her daughter. This new graphic novel from two inimitable talents combines sensitivity, psychological insight, and tender humor.
Perec offers us guided tours of the capital through crossword puzzles (one per arrondissement) and explorations of space along meticulously planned routes, such as this alphabetical stroll, an “ideal” journey that, starting from a street beginning with the letter A, would end on a street beginning with the letter Z, passing successively through all the letters of the alphabet.
“Because playing and writing are almost one and the same, let yourself be guided through letters, time, and space—a whole Perec-esque world made of “irresistible playful challenges” (Sylvia Richardson).
This bestselling French novel about a little girl visiting Paris museums as she loses her eyesight was the very first book in translation to be named Barnes & Noble’s top book of the year. This beautiful graphic edition contains full-color reproductions of more than 160 of the classic artworks described in the novel, along with the full text. A luxurious gift for readers and art-lovers alike.
To coincide with her exhibition “À toi de faire, ma mignonne” (It’s Up to You, My Darling) at the Picasso Museum in Paris, Sophie Calle unveiled her unfinished ideas, which are also her failures.
In this landmark collection, which reveals the hidden aspects of decades of work, we find the main themes of her oeuvre, such as chance, serendipitous encounters, and above all, her central idea of incompleteness as a culmination, and of experimentation and failure as corollaries of artistic action.
Daniel Pennac’s unique and explosive saga, launched in 1985, is now available for the first time in an 8-volume collector’s edition.
In this octalogy, a blend of crime fiction, literature, nostalgia, and contemporary themes, Daniel Pennac recounts the tragicomic adventures of the seven Malaussène children, each born to a different father. This “joyfully chaotic” tribe roams the streets of Belleville in a relentless, unrelenting existence: the eldest and head of the brood, Benjamin, but also Louna, Clara, Thérèse, Jérémy, Le Petit, and the epileptic dog, Julius. For nearly 40 years, the author has brilliantly shattered the conventions of the crime novel, growing alongside his readers.
In this new novel, awarded the , Yanick Lahens pays a tribute of hope and resistance to the lineage of women from whom she comes. When the novel’s two heroines meet, in a scene of rare emotional power, we, the readers, will understand that history is not written solely by the victors, but also in the beauty of gestures, glances, and unspoken mysteries that quietly reveal the path of a resistance that commands admiration.
Lillian Ross was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, and wrote on filmmakers regularly over the course of her extraordinary career. This beautifully bound collection features essays on: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and many, many more.
While picking flowers on Midsummer’s Eve, Moomintroll, Snufkin and Little My discover a park in the middle of the forest. ‘Forbidden to enter without permission’ and a lot of other admonitions are written on the warning signs behind the high fence. An angry Hemulen keeps a close watch to make sure no one in the park has fun. What nonsense, thinks Snufkin, who dislikes all kinds of bans. The forest belongs to everyone!
Flaming midsummer bonfires, hattifattens and a prickly policeman are some of the ingredients in this magical summer fairy tale, inspired by Tove Jansson’s classic book ‘Moominsummer Madness’.
