Reality reads: Best of non-fiction

Last week, we brought you a sampling of the best fiction in 2006. But the real, very often, is far more captivating than the imaginary. Here are a few titles that proved this...

The Last Mughal
William Dalrymple (Penguin)

The last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, lies mouldering in his unmarked grave in Rangoon; a weak king who preferred poets to the rebels of 1857 who sealed his death when he gave them his seal of approval. Dalrymple disentangles the myths around the Mutiny and offers a remarkable portrait of the twilight of Delhi as the rift between British India and the Other India grew.

Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide
Pradip Krishen (Dorling Kindersley)

Filmmaker Pradip Krishen spent 10 years on this book, and you can see it in his photographs, read it in the stories with which he brings the city's trees alive. The Leaf Key makes this guide easy for even neophytes to use, and it can be used across swathes of North India, but the real reason to buy it is that it gives you an excuse to fall in love with a city and its embattled open spaces again.

Heat
Bill Buford (Knopf)

It doesn't matter how enthusiastic we are about cooking and food; most of us are never going to buy a whole pig on which to practise our butchering skills, have the chef pelt us with sauteed fennel as we slave in Babbo's kitchen, or eat lardo, uncured pork fat, with Mario Batalli. Just as well, then, that Granta's legendary editor Bill Buford took time off from his day job to explore this magnificent, quixotic obsession.

Mockingbird: A Life of Harper Lee
Charles J Shields (Henry Holt)

Harper Lee wrote an immortal first novel "" To Kill a Mockingbird, said she would like to write more about the American South that she knew so well, helped her good friend Truman Capote with In Cold Blood, and retreated into a very private life. In Shields' hands, Lee comes across neither as a recluse nor as a caricature, but as a complex, confident woman who never believed she owed the world an explanation for her silence.

A Life Less Ordinary
Baby Haldar (Zubaan/ Penguin India)

A "domestic servant" is twice disenfranchised in this country "" robbed often of a normal childhood and life, robbed of the ways in which to speak of the theft. Baby Haldar escaped a bad marriage and a stifling world, travelled to Delhi and worked here as a maid for many years before the professor whom she worked for helped her tell her story. This ordinary life, told by an extraordinary woman, captured readers across the world.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
Tom Reiss (Random House)

The star-crossed love story of Ali and Nino, told by a certain Kurban Said, became Azerbaijan's version of Laila and Majnu. But "Kurban Said" remained an enigmatic figure. The Azerbaijanis claimed him as one of their own, many suspected he was not an "Asiatic" at all, and some suspected the author was a Jewish baroness. Tom Reiss uncovers the life of Lev Nussimbaum, who reinvented himself as Essad Bey/ Kurban Said, a royal Muslim scholar. Nussimbaum himself was an inveterate if delightful liar who flirted with Fascism before he got on the wrong side of the regime, and made up a life to suit himself.

Freakonomics
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of

Everything: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow) In the world of economics, Levitt and Dubner make you think of Russell Crowe as the gladiator: "Are you not entertained?" they ask as they explain why drug dealers live with their mothers, what connects sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers, whether parents are really necessary. Yes, we were.

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
Edward Luce (Little, Brown)

Edward Luce married into this country before he began reporting on it, and this book is the perfect insider-outsider's account. From the Cow Products Research Centre to a hard look at India's "schizophrenic economy", Luce hits all the expected marks and then some. He steers clear, for the most part, of sweeping judgement in favour of sharp reportage, humour and, unusual in a journalist, humility.

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin)

"There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true." That would be Richard Dawkins, who produced anything but a comforting argument in The God Delusion, one of this year's most controversial, reviled and fascinating books. Belief is a delusion, God a consensual hallucination, and Dawkins thinks he can prove it. God save his soul if he's wrong, I guess!

You Must Set Forth At Dawn
Wole Soyinka (Random House)

Soyinka, Nigeria's most revered writer, spent most of his adult life in exile, fleeing from General Sani Abacha's brutal reign, drawing the circle of writing and of family and friends close around him as some compensation. This long-awaited sequel to his memoir of childhood, Ake, is brilliant and poignant.