Rick O’Shea: My favourite nonfiction books that will take you places most of us will never see

From a Ukrainian town haunted by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 to a rare inside look at North Korea, these books are guaranteed to provide food for thought

Clockwise from left: Markiyan Kamysh, Rose George, Barbara Demick and Robert Macfarlane

Rick O'Shea

One of the many, many reasons I read is to experience the impossible. When I was a kid, I found Enid Blyton’s Famous Five irresistible. To a working-class boy in Dublin in the 1980s, a bunch of posh kids with their own island solving crimes was as far from real life as I thought I could get.

As I got older, I was drawn to sci-fi and speculative fiction and their new worlds, ideas, societies. I still crave the impossible for the price of a paperback, but in recent times my tastes have started to include books about the real world around us. It’s full of places that are, for reasons like politics, difficulty and danger, mostly forbidden or open to only the few. For some people they’re fascinated by the rich and exclusive end of that equation — there are no shortage of TV shows about mansions, yachts, people with more money than they could ever spend. My curiosities are slightly different.​