Here's one way to please two people with one gift this season: give a loved one a book from our curated list of local works and support a local author at the same time. What's more, these are little gems, some of which you might not have heard of, that really deserve to be read and appreciated by more people.

The Weight Of Our Sky Author: Hanna Alkaf Publisher: Salaam Reads, historical young adult (YA) fiction This is the story of Melati Ahmad, who seems like your typical 16-year-old, except for one thing: She believes she has a djinn inside her that bombards her with horrible images and the only way to stop the pictures is to appease it with counting rituals. And then Melati gets swept up in the Kuala Lumpur race riots of 1969 and becomes separated from her mother. Finding her way back home in a now-divided city will be difficult, especially with a djinn involved.... This very well-received book is far from your typical local YA fiction dealing as it does with mental illness. Author Hanna Alkaf said in an interview, “I had never seen mental illness and Islam intersect in a young-adult book before.” We haven’t either.