Non-fiction

By now, you've probably already read or heard a lot about this book.

In the summer of 1970-71, I suspect I was like a lot of young music fans, desperately looking for an inspirational band to replace The Beatles, who, clearly and very sadly, were finished, never to be reunited.

Punter has hung up his baggy green, and the last great player in a great era of Australian cricket has signed off with a thumping, exhaustive life story.

The title is intriguing but deceptive.

As indispensable as warp-speed, artificial gravity and beaming-up in 23rd-century Star Trek was the little pocket communicator.

Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer is the story of the serial killer who never was.

Next year marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1. Expect a deluge of books, films and TV programmes

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), the deadliest in America's history, killed nearly 3000 people and the area became known as Ground Zero.

If you have read and enjoyed Thomas Hardy's Wessex stories, you will appreciate this brilliant little book and find yourself going back to the stories with even more enjoyment and understanding, not only of them, but also of their author.

I've read a couple of Maeve Binchy's books and enjoyed her writing style, so thought dipping into a selection of her contributions to The Irish Times might be diverting.

The further you read into this fascinating book the more confused about its focus you become. Is it a book about food, as the title most insistently maintains?

I grew up in a house where books were at a premium: just a set of Dickens, a Shakespeare, a dictionary and an encyclopaedia.

A coffee-table tome filled with beautiful photographs of spacecraft and cosmic wonders this is not.

Why are so many of us fascinated by royalty?

It used to be claimed that Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was one of the least-read bestsellers of the 1980s.

''Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.''

In this remarkable book, something between a memoir, a case study, and a mystery story, Delphine de Vigan describes a daughter's search for the underlying cause of her mother's intermittent psychotic episodes and eventual suicide.

One of the best-known episodes of World War 2 was the so-called ''Great Escape'', when 76 RAF prisoners of war fled their POW camp, Stalag Luft III.

What a record of greed, corruption, half-truths and untruths the Australian coal industry has set. 

In January 2009, I had the privilege of watching the ''genius at work'' live in Melbourne. Roger Federer displayed perfect tennis against Juan Martin Del Potro to advance to the semifinals of the Australian Open.