Here are some last-minute Amazon gifts that should arrive before Christmas

Olia Hercules’s name will be familiar to many food-lovers. When Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine in February this year, the world changed – and Hercules’s life was transformed – she is now an activist as well as a cook. #CookforUkraine, set up by Hercules and several colleagues, has raised almost £800,000 for victims of the war, and she keeps her 148,000 Instagram followers up to date on the conflict with regular updates.

Home Food is her fourth book. The collection of essays and 100 recipes, photographed by her husband, Joe Woodhouse, is her most personal and heartfelt to date. Dishes span Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Italy, India, Cyprus and beyond (her recipe for dark greens with nettles and yoghurt was simple but stunning). Some recipes are brought to life by QR codes linked to videos showing techniques, such as making brown butter and hand-rolling pasta.

The driving force behind Home Food is the sense of connection – to family, friends, community ­– that cooking can bring in times of hardship, and it thoroughly deserves a place on every cook’s shelf.

Read more: The best cookbooks of 2022

Out of all the subscription services offered by Microsoft, PlayStation and Nintendo, the Xbox Game Pass might just be the best value for money. Much like a streaming service, the Game Pass allows users to access a huge library of titles across Xbox consoles, PC and even cloud gaming. Some of our favourite Xbox games are available through Game Pass with more added on a monthly basis, meaning there’s always something new to play.

Users can choose to purchase a one-month or three-month subscription via a retail voucher code or it can be renewed on a monthly basis. To access some fantastic titles, including Halo, Forza and the excellent Yakuza series, to name a few, it might just be the ultimate gaming stocking stuffer.

Read more: The best gifts for gamers

Way cheaper than upgrading your television is buying a simple smart TV stick, which plugs into any television with an HDMI port and unlocks entertainment across a breadth of popular streaming apps.

The Fire TV Stick has enough features for most users, includes all of the most popular streaming services – from All 4 and BBC iPlayer to Netflix and Paramount Plus – and comes with a voice-activated remote for quickly navigating to your favourite shows.

Read more: The best streaming devices

Orchard Toys can always be trusted to make a game that’s genuinely fun for kids and adults, while having an educational angle too.

This cute game features 24 colourful 3D geese to collect. Each player is given a collection board and must roll the dice to make their way around the board, rounding up the geese, shouting “Honk” while collecting their geese and ‘goose on the loose’, if they lose one. It develops colour recognition as well as numeracy skills, through the rolling of the dice.

The Kindle paperwhite is a more-premium version of the basic Kindle, and, as such, it’s got a few more useful features included, such as a better backlight and adjustable screen colour.

The kids’ edition is virtually identical, but includes a child-friendly case and a one-year subscription to Amazon’s library of more than 1,000 books curated for young readers of all ages.

The case isn’t too “kiddy” either, so it’s perfect for older kids who are getting into reading longer and longer books. This Kindle is otherwise the same as the one Amazon markets to adults, so you can stick Richard Osman’s latest on there and get some use out of it too.

If you’re looking for a fun, easy-to-learn card game that’s perfect for small gatherings, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is a great one to add to the collection. Players take turns putting cards on a pile, saying each word included in the game’s name. If they place a card that matches the word they just said – taco, cat, goat, cheese or pizza – everyone has to put their hands on the pile, and the last to do so takes all the cards.

There are also some wildcards thrown in, which require players to perform an action before slamming their hands down. It works a bit like the game Snap, with some extra steps, but it’s family-friendly and a game can be completed in less than 10 minutes.

Book buffs will delight in receiving Pandora Skyes’s What Writers Read (if they don’t already own it). The podcaster and journalist’s non-fiction tome takes the form of a series of curated essays written by authors on their favourite writers, ranging from Leïla Slimani on Milan Kundera’s cult classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Benjamin Zephaniah on bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman, to Elif Shafak on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – with other literary love letters penned by the likes of Dolly Alderton, Marian Keyes, Deborah Levy, David Nicholls, Lisa Taddeo and more.

Readers can enjoy a new perspective on a much-loved favourite or discover new titles for their reading pile in 2023. Plus, all proceeds go to the National Literacy Trust.

We all know buying kitchen gadgets for your other half can be a fast track to ending a relationship. However, if you’re looking for a gift for a couple who love cooking and eating, small appliances remain fair game – especially if you choose this year’s must-have gadget: the air fryer.

This one from Tefal is a real kitchen game-changer and combines an air fryer with a health grill, so they’ll barely need to use their oven with this in the house. It’s not too huge to keep out on the worktop, yet has a decent 4.2l capacity to suit a whole family (or a very hungry couple).

It has eight pre-set modes, including roast chicken, meat and fries for super-simple cooking – our teenager loved whipping up frozen chicken nuggets in a matter of minutes. Chips were particularly tasty, thanks to the Extra Crisp air-circulation technology but we were surprised by how much we loved the grill, which was perfect for producing succulent steak and tasty salmon. It’s a little noisy when cooking but we reckon the lucky couple will wonder how they ever lived without it.

When last-minute Christmas shopping for family and friends, you can’t go far wrong with a nice bottle of something they like. If that’s a single malt, a wee dram of this 12-year-old Glenlivet can be on your doorstep in time for the Christmas dinner toast.

The limited edition scotch has notes of vanilla and strawberry, and is inspired by the oldest bottle Glenlivet has. The gift box is decorated in the original distilling licence granted to founder George Smith in the 1800s.

Not the original original, obviously. It’s just printed on the box. The original is probably being kept somewhere safe.

While Woodford Reserve was launched in 1996, the brand’s distillery site is one of Kentucky’s oldest, having been used since 1812. A small-batch Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey, Woodford Reserve is distilled in a mixture of copper pot stills and columns stills, with the flagship expression aged in new charred American oak barrels for around seven years.

With a mash bill of 72 per cent corn, 10 per cent malted barley and 18 per cent rye, it has a very high rye content compared with other bourbons. As a result, plenty of rye spiciness prevails on the palate, joined by a banana bread note that’s become synonymous with Woodford Reserve, plus cinnamon, walnut, dark chocolate, marmalade and dark cherry on the finish with just a whisper of tobacco leaf, menthol and dry oak notes. A perfect base whiskey for old fashioned cocktails.

Thank you, Richard Osman. The TV guy turned best-selling murder mystery novelist is the undisputed king of last-minute gifts. Many Christmases have been saved by his books, which release annually and are perennially available in the WHSmith in Gatwick’s south terminal.

The third book in his Thursday Murder Club series is called The Bullet That Missed. Cards on the table, we haven’t read this one, but the series comes highly recommended by our IndyBest mums.

Got a loved one who is constantly losing their stuff? Meet the Apple AirTag, a disc-shaped tracker that slots neatly around your keys, into your wallet or around the strap of your backpack. Thanks to ultra-wideband technology, turn-by-turn directions lead you straight to your stuff if you’re in range, with just the use of your iPhone, complete with handy vibrations as you get closer. The only issue? You’ll probably need to buy an AirTag accessory, if you want to hook it onto anything. It’s a very Apple product, you see.

Read the full Apple AirTag review

This citrus and bergamot concoction is sure to float the olfactory boat of its lucky recipient. Its nuanced, gender-neutral blend is a far cry from the “mumsy” florals many reed diffuser scents are associated with.

Sanctuary Spa makes its fragrances without microbeads and parabens, and is against animal testing.

As far as standalone virtual-reality headsets go, the Meta Quest 2 is certainly the most user-friendly. While other, more-powerful VR setups require a decently specced PC to run the most demanding VR games, the Quest 2 works as a standalone headset, so you can play games practically anywhere.

The headset itself comes with built-in tracking cameras, so you can move around a 3D space with precision. If you’re worried about bumping into furniture, the “guardian mode” allows you to outline a safe space on the floor, so, when you move toward the edge, a helpful grid can let you know when you’re about to reach out of bounds. It made it into our list of best VR headsets for a reason, and the Meta Quest 2 still remains the easiest way to enter virtual reality.