Man Booker Prize judge Mr Sam Leith recommends the page-turners to curl up with during the holidays.

Of all the pleasures we associate with Christmas – the champagne cocktails or eggnog for breakfast, the hecatombs of hammy goodness, tow-headed urchins lisping carols as chestnuts toast on an open fire – there’s one in particular that I really look forward to. Imagine it: lunch is over, an uncle is rumbling gently in an armchair, someone has taken the children out of earshot and you, at last, have some time to yourself. So, with a blissful sigh, paper hat still askew on your head, you subside onto the sofa – and you open a book.

The ideal reading for Christmas afternoon is something you can get lost in. In choosing a handful of books to recommend, I’ve put the pleasure principle front and centre. Each one of these books is brainfood in some way, but each one is also, crucially, a fantastically absorbing read. These are books you’ll be sorry to finish, but eager to share. I know I was.

I served as a judge on this year’s Man Booker panel, so I hope you’ll forgive me inserting our winner – I’d be failing you if I didn’t press it on you. Other than that, here is a handful of newish books including a landmark work of popular science, a biography that’s nothing like you think it will be and a comic novel about Professor Richard Dawkins that had publishers running scared. Happy reading!

by Ms Miriam Toews (Faber & Faber)

The Canadian writer Ms Miriam Toews (it’s pronounced taves) draws on her own experience for this novel, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Her father and sister both committed suicide, the latter 12 years after the former. All My Puny Sorrows describes the relationship between the narrator, Yoli, and her suicidal older sister, Elf. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.” Sounds grim, right? But the miraculous thing about this book is that (as well as being piercingly sad) it is, incredibly, laugh-out-loud funny. It might also, at Christmas, make you that much more appreciative of your family.

by Mr Dan Rhodes (Aardvark Bureau)

This delightful comic novel, originally self-published with a print run of just 400, has a bit of a history. The novel concerns the adventures of a comically pompous atheist professor called Richard Dawkins (motto: “cordiality always”) and his depressed manservant Smee. Mainstream publishers refused to touch it for fear of being sued by the real Professor Richard Dawkins, who (though a noted champion of free speech) didn’t respond to polite requests to give his blessing to Mr Dan Rhodes’ book. Still, now it’s out from Aardvark Bureau – and it’s very, very funny; also, slyly philosophical. Laugh it up, Dawko!

by Mr Marlon James (Oneworld Publications)

It’s not brief, and there are a whole lot of killings. This year’s Man Booker winner is a spectacular, swaggering, almost indecently exciting story, spreading out from the gang violence of 1970s Jamaica to New York’s crack houses in the 1980s and 1990s. It combines the literary kudos of Mr William Faulkner with, once you get going, the narrative propulsion of Mr James Ellroy, and – in its gangster protagonist Josey Wales – it has one of the all-time great bad guys of fiction. As a friend of mine said, it’s a “vast, ambitious, burning mansion of a book”. And, as a bonus, it will teach you how to swear in Jamaican patois. Mark my words, there’s no swearing quite like it.

by Mr Stephen Pinker (Penguin)

This is the book that made Mr Stephen Pinker’s reputation, and goodness me it’s good. Who knew developmental psycholinguistics could be so interesting? You don’t need an ounce of technical knowledge to read this book and find your whole understanding of the way language and the brain work revivified and transformed. It’s absolutely gripping, and there’s something on almost every page that you will want to read aloud to whoever’s within earshot. Saddle up and get your Chomsky on.

by Ms Sue Prideaux (Yale University Press)

Hold up, I hear you say. Isn’t Mr August Strindberg that dead Swedish dude who wrote weird plays? This doesn’t sound much like Christmas reading. Trust me. Yes, he is that dead Swedish dude. But he was also a feminist, alchemist, debtor, blasphemer, playwright, boot-fetishist, historian, cartographer, expert on French toilets, painter, collector of dialect terms for ladybirds, madman, linguist, alleged peacock thief and befriender of bears. Mr Strindberg was so extraordinary and his life so bonkers that you find yourself agog. So here’s a book that will enrich your afternoon and make you look intellectual at the same time.

by Mr Damon Runyon (Picador)

Mr Damon Runyon, if he’s thought of at all these days, is known as the inspiration for the musical Guys And Dolls. Yet he’s one of the funniest short-story writers who ever lived. These tales of good-time girls and con men and horse players and hoodlums in Depression-era New York (told out of the corner of the mouth in the continuous present tense) are just bliss. Try The Snatching Of Bookie Bob, Sense Of Humour and Hold ’Em, Yale for starters. If America had a Mr PG Wodehouse, he would be Mr Damon Runyon.

by Mr Richard Ford (Bloomsbury)

This wonderful book might have been a contender for the Man Booker Prize this year, but it turned out to be ineligible on the grounds that it’s linked short stories rather than a novel. A sort of festive coda to Mr Richard Ford’s Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay Of The Land), here are four snapshots of the books’ everyman protagonist Frank Bascombe in grumpy old age around Christmas time, moaning about the radio, visiting his ex-wife in a nursing home, and surveying the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy. Mr Ford is just a lovely writer and these stories are witty, rueful and poignant.