Books and films to look for on Black Friday, recommended by Telegraph experts

Lace up your combat boots, stuff your bag full of snacks and stock up on energy drinks - the intrepid bargain hunter must be prepared when venturing out to the shops during Black Friday today.

Luckily, the Telegraph experts have selected their top 2018 picks for books and films to cut through brain power needed when making split second purchasing decisions surviving the chaotic maw of Regent and Oxford Streets (or, more likely, purchasing from the comfort and safety of your home on Amazon).

Below are our top 10 picks when hunting for book and film deals; happy hunting!:

Top Black Friday Books

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Bauer, with all the zestful verve of a drunk running around a zoo and opening random cages, arranges for her disparate cast members – a 14-year-old boy providing for his two little sisters; an expectant mother menaced by a creepy intruder; two chalk-and-cheese policemen – to collide with each other, with consequences variously comic and thrilling. Kate Atkinson used to be undisputed master of this mix of the serious, the exciting and the anarchic, but Bauer is now firmly in her class.

Left Bank by Agnès Poirier

Even correcting for nostalgia, Paris in the Fifties seems to have been a time when giants really did walk the Earth. Once you start listing them, it is hard to stop: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Picasso, Giacometti, visited by James Baldwin and Miles Davis, all in the same few streets and cafés. Gossipy without being prurient, Poirier is good at tracing the links between the work and the ever-shifting sexual liaisons of her subjects.

Read our full review here

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Readers picking up the 29-year-old Alderton’s book may be reminded of the title of B S Johnson’s 1973 Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? But this is not a book that could lurk in a drawer for a decade: it’s about what it’s like to be young, and dating, right now.

The Language of Kindness by Christie Watson

This outstanding memoir of life as an NHS nurse is really the story of learning to be kind, and how that challenges, sometimes harms, and then completes a person. There are allusions, latterly, to burnout, compassion fatigue, the sheer grind of soldiering on in a system that at times seems to hate you. But Watson is never bitter; just full of longing for more compassionate times.

Big Week by James Holland

After Burma ’44 and The War in the West, the latest in Holland’s sensationally successful Second World War histories is the account of a week in February 1944, when the combined Allied air forces in Britain and Italy launched their first-ever round-the-clock bomber offensive against Germany.

Circe by Madeline Miller

“Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting.” So says Circe, the enchantress, in this luminous novel built on ancient myth. The song that Circe mentions, of course, is Homer’s Odyssey, and readers familiar with the material will delight in the craft of Miller’s sly tweaks to these well-worn tales. This is both a fabulous novel and a fascinating retelling; the best compliment, perhaps, that any myth could hope for.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

Would anyone have predicted, in 2011, that Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind would go on to sell a million copies, and retain a foothold in the bestseller chart seven years later, alongside its sequel, Homo Deus? His publishers will be hoping for a hat-trick with these essays on the big issues of the day: Brexit, big data and God.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall, a 29-year-old stripper from a grubby club called the Mars Room, is serving two life sentences in a Californian jail for murdering her stalker. The story she (mostly) narrates is salty, hilarious, hard-boiled and, unlike Kushner’s other novels, untethered from its historical moment, which is the early 2000s. Romy and her cellmates are suspended in time, outside history, as if they live on another planet – somewhere like Mars, but smaller. This magnificent novel leaves one in no doubt that Kushner is one of America’s greatest living authors.

Read our full review here

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

The simple and enormous question of how to live a meaningful life is the subject of Wolitzer’s humane, roomy novel, which maps out a potted history of the feminist movement through two women: Greer, a wide-eyed student with a muddled desire to do something that matters, and her mentor Faith, a hardened veteran of post-war radicalism. Hugely enjoyable and fizzing with ideas.

Read our full review here

Lullaby by Le?la Slimani, tr Sam Taylor

The French, having given us the concept of the au pair, now seem intent on warning us of the dangers of letting a stranger loose on our children. This compelling novel, winner of the Prix Goncourt, begins with the fatal stabbing of a baby boy and his toddler sister by their nanny, then rewinds to examine what drove her to it.

Top Black Friday Films

The Post ★★★★★

Director: Steven Spielberg; Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Carrie Coon, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie. Cert 12A, 116 mins.

It's 1971. Meryl Streep is Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, whilst Tom Hanks is editor Ben Bradlee.

The pair clash when a reporter unearths a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a secret document setting out the ongoing Vietnam War’s various failures and flaws. There's a moral impetus to publish the revelations which damn the Nixon administration, but that could could see the whistleblowers jailed.

This film affords Streep her richest role in at least a decade. The Best Actress and Best Picture Oscar nods are well-deserved.

Read our full review here

Isle of Dogs ★★★★☆

Director: Wes Anderson. Cast: Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig. 12A cert; 101 mins

Everything you might expect to be cute, charming and generally edible about a canine-themed Wes Anderson stop-motion animation is spectacularly upended, then poured into a landfill, during Isle of Dogs. This is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And the premise hardly hides all this away. It’s about a diseased community of unwanted mutts, dumped on a trash island off the coast of a dystopian future Japan. The director flirts with grotesquerie and even shocks with his late-breaking gambits. For once, in tone and in habitat, he has well and truly exited his comfort zone. Read the full review

I, Tonya ★★★★☆

Director: Craig Gillespie. Cast: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale, Mckenna Grace. 15 cert, 119 mins

These days, being Tonya Harding, the Olympic figure skater whose career went up in smoke in 1994, is presumably even harder than playing her, but Margot Robbie’s job in the viciously mesmerising I, Tonya still bespeaks a high degree of difficulty. And risk: the film, and her performance, glide on the knife-edge between satire and sympathy, often dazzling with their footwork. Read our full review here

Phantom Thread ★★★★★

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson; Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, Camilla Rutherford, Harriet Sansom Harris, Brian Gleeson, Gina McKee, Julia Davis. 15 cert, 130 mins.

Daniel Day-Lewis, in his final on-screen role, is Reynolds Woodcock, an internationally renowned couturier working in 1950s London.

As usual, he fully inhabited the role for this sumptuously shot film, which explores the designers relationship with his muse Alma (Vicky Krieps), and his sister and lifelong assistant Cyril (Lesley Manville).

Read our full review here

The Shape of Water ★★★★★

Director: Guillermo del Toro; Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg. Cert 15 119 mins.

What should be B-movie fodder – mysterious, terrifying fish-monster is found, scientists study it, woman falls in love with it – is somehow rendered into a tender, beautiful melodrama here.

Set during the Cold War, the film explores the unlikely connection between the swamp-thing and Elisa, the cleaner who works in the lab where it is held captive. Hotly tipped for the Oscars, what could be a schlocky horror becomes a deft exploration of the post-war American psyche.

Read our full review here.

Black Panther ★★★★☆

Director: Ryan Coogler; Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B Jordan, Letitia Wright, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis. 12A cert, 134 mins.

A groundbreaking Marvel superhero film set in Africa and featuring a largely black cast, this movie looks sumptuous and has more depth than the usual comicbook offerings.

T'Challa must take on the mantle of king and Black Panther when his father dies, but he faces threats both external and internal Serkis' Afrikaaner arms dealer wants to plunder the natural resources of his kingdom, whilst exile Erik Killmonger wants his throne.

Read our full review here

The Breadwinner ★★★★☆

Director: Nora Twomey Starring: Saara Chaudry, Ali Badshah, Laara Sadiq, Shaista Latif, Soma Bhatia, Noorin Gulamgaus (voices). 12A cert, 93 mins

Thrilling animation about a young girl living under the Taliban, who when her liberal-minded father is imprisoned due to the oppressive regime must ultimately become the sole provider for her family.

Read our full review here

Hereditary ★★★★★

Director: Ari Aster Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd. 15 cert, 127 mins

After the death of her mother, the family matriarch, a daughter begins to uncover the horrifying secrets of her family's dark connections. Widely acclaimed as the scariest film of the year, it's no surprise that this film gave one of its cast members PTSD.

Read our full review here

Lady Bird ★★★★☆

Director: Greta Gerwig. Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Lois Smith. 15 cert, 94 mins

Greta Gerwig's Oscar-nominated debut as a standalone director features a standout performance from Saoirse Ronan, playing roughly a teenage version of her director, is every bit as nuanced and appealing as the acting work Gerwig's has turned in herself. Read the fill review

Early Man ★★★★☆

Director: Nick Park. Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall, Miriam Margolyes, Rob Brydon, Kayvan Novak, Gina Yashere, Richard Ayoade, Johnny Vegas (voices). PG cert, 89 mins.

A classic Nick Park claymation film, Early Man is about a tribe of stone-age stragglers in a world that’s moved on to bronze. The conflict between the natives and better-armed group of settlers has to be decided through a high-stakes game of newly-invented football.

No frame is wasted, and every scene is crammed with so much casual comic detail, repeat viewings are more or less required.

Read our full review here