The Telegraph Christmas books quiz 2014

How many questions in the seven rounds of our Christmas literary quiz can you answer? Get the family to help out, and check your answers here. Don't forget the picture round...

Round One: It’s Christmas

Books and the festive season

1. At the beginning of which novel does the narrator explain: “I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas”?

2. In Jane Austen’s Emma, whose marriage proposal does Emma turn down after a Christmas party held by her neighbours, the Westons, for members of Highbury society?

3. Which Christmas single took its title from that of a novel by J P Donleavy published in 1973?

4. Which writer, who died on Christmas Eve 1863, wrote a novel that shares its title with that of a place in The Pilgrim’s Progress — and that of a glossy magazine?

5. Which poet, born on Christmas Eve 1822, wrote the poems “Dover Beach”, “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis” – which contains the much-quoted description of Oxford as “that sweet City with her dreaming spires”?

6. Which children’s Christmas story in verse takes place in Whoville?

7. Who narrates the 1892 short story that centres on a blue carbuncle being found in the neck of a Christmas goose?

8. Who wrote the 2003 bestseller in which Henry DeTamble time-travels his way out of a car crash that kills his mother one Christmas Eve?

9. Whose most recent book is Let Me Be Frank with You, which comprises four stories featuring his long-running character Frank Bascombe in the run-up to Christmas?

10. What connects the beginning of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with a recently launched brand of cannabis?

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Round Two: A Time for Family

Literary relations

1. Which novel features the identical twins Sam and Eric — known collectively as Samneric?

2. Whose books for children include Gangsta Granny and Awful Auntie?

3. Which 19th-century literary character marries Arabella Donn, divorces her, has two children with his cousin Sue (both of whom die in tragic circumstances) and then marries Arabella again?

4. Which of the three Brontë sisters died last?

5. What is the first name of Margaret Drabble’s novelist sister?

6. The father of which 20th-century novelist was the first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography?

7. The Pevensie siblings — Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy — appear in which series of novels?

8. Which family provides the title for the most famous book by Johann David Wyss?

9. As what is Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky better known in a play of 1899?

10. Whose novels of family life include Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Breathing Lessons?

^{Steffan Hill}

Round Three: A Time for Buying Books

A round on bestsellers

1. Which book, never out of print since, was first published in 1852 — and began: “Ens, entity, being, existence”?

2. What’s the only book in Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles — basically, all her blockbusters — whose title is more than one word long?

3. Which bestselling novelist is married to the woman who was the Labour MP for Stevenage between 1997 and 2010?

4. Which bestseller of the Noughties was the first novel by Lauren Weisberger?

5. Which bestseller of the Fifties was the first novel by Grace Metalious?

6. In 1960, which literary novel sold two million copies in the six weeks before Christmas?

7. Who, in 2009, became the first writer ever to top the British hardback fiction bestseller list with a novel in translation?

8. Which long-standing bestseller describes itself on the title page as “translated from the original equine”?

9. Who’s the heroine of a series of bestselling books that have been going since 1930, have sold 200 million copies and have been written by various authors under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene?

10. Which Belgian is among the top 10 bestselling novelists in history?

^{Geraint Lewis / Rex Features}

Round Four: A Time for Eating and Drinking

In this round, all the correct answers contain a food or drink

1. Which classic American novel features the Joad family?

2. Which much-loved children’s book begins with a drawing, and the words, “These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr Bucket”?

3. Whose first novel was Interview with a Vampire?

4. Which main character in an influential play is first seen on stage with his friend Cliff and his wife Alison?

5. What was the first novel by Paul Torday, published when he was 59, that became both a bestseller and a film starring Ewan McGregor?

6. The Quentin Tarantino film Jackie Brown was an adaptation of which novel by Elmore Leonard?

7. Who wrote the scandalous novel Glenarvon, based on her affair with Lord Byron?

8. Which 18th-century novel has the critic Christopher Ricks described as “the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language”?

9. Which 1985 novel about a religious upbringing has eight chapters, named after the first eight books of the Bible?

10. In which 19th-century novel would you find the chimney sweep Tom and the fairy Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby?

^{FremantleMedia Ltd/REX}

Round Five: Ring out the Old

2014 in Books

1. Who’s the detective in Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders, published in September?

2. Which eponymous bird won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in America, but wasn’t even longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the first year when US writers were eligible?

3. Which of the novels on the Man Booker shortlist had the shortest title?

4. In an autobiography published in October, who said of whom: “He could walk into a room and suck all the joy out of it in five seconds”?

5. Who perhaps half-surprised his Hay Festival audience by declaring “I am a secular Christian”?

6. In what way was The Silkworm both the second and the 13th bestseller that its author has written?

7. Title-wise, which MP followed a Beatles’ B-side with a Beatles’ album track?

8. According to the title of the winner of the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, what is “a half-formed thing”?

9. Which two winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature died this year, one South African, one Colombian?

10. And which writer, who died in April, was Britain’s bestselling novelist of the 1980s?

^{Justin Williams / Rex Features}

Round Six: And Then It’s Back to Work

A round on jobs and professions, where the job or profession can occur in the question or the answer

1. In the final act of which Elizabethan play does the main character refer to Helen of Troy as “the face that launched a thousand ships”?

2. What’s the title of the first book in Jennifer Worth’s trilogy of bestselling memoirs?

3. In which novel does William Boot became an unlikely foreign correspondent, covering a civil war in Africa?

4. Which fictional town is the banker Nicholas Bulstrode eventually forced to leave in disgrace?

5. In William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, who is the merchant of Venice?

6. Which fictional policeman first appeared in the 1976 novel Last Bus to Woodstock?

7. Whose novels include The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and Vox — a novel about phone-sex, a copy of which Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton during their affair?

8. In which American play does the main character have a wife called Linda and two sons, Biff and Happy?

9. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, what’s the name of the farmer whom the animals overthrow?

Picture Round

Pictures of literary luminaries are scattered throughout the quiz above. The first letters of these writers’ surnames, when rearranged, spell out a word associated with Christmas. Who are the writers and what is the word?