Paul McGuinness, manager of U2
Mary, Mary (Townhouse, £14.99) by Julie Parsons is the psychological thriller of the year. Someone called it Silence of The Lambs set in Ballsbridge. Michael Colgan and I liked it so much we have bought the film rights for our new film company. The Untouchable (Picador, £5.99 in UK) by John Banville, I have to choose because I read all about the British intelligence services and this novel is a great coda to all the Anthony Blunt and Cambridge Apostles over the years. The central character is unsympathetic but fascinating.
Marc O'Neill, designer
Cream - Contemporary Art In Culture (Phaidon, £29.95 in UK) is a vacuum-packed two-inch think-bible of who's who in the international contemporary art world. It is brilliantly put together and a must for the coffee table. Courreges (Thames and Hudson, £12.95 in UK) by Valerie Guillaume, is an inspiring study of the French designer, famous for his modernist approach to fashion. Real Food (4th Estate, £18.99 in UK) by Nigel Slater is a culinary masterpiece specially tailored to the needs of cooking fanatics with limited time. He even advises how to serve the best chips.
Sarah Kavanagh, racing driver
The Genesis Code (Arrow, £5.99 in UK) by John Case is a thriller set around a murder in the US involving a mother and her son, and a doctor in Italy who makes a confession about it. These murders of little boys have been happening all over the world, and there are elements of the downfall of the Roman Church. There are some really gruesome death descriptions - a real chiller. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (4th Estate, £5.99 in UK) by Dominique Bauby is an amazing story by and about the editor in chief of Elle magazine in France, who suffered a massive stroke in his thirties and dictated this book using his eyelid. It's about the whole trauma and journey of being so disabled and unable to communicate and yet so lucid in his own head. Only a Game (Penguin, £6.99 in UK) by Eamonn Dunphy, was republished this year. It is written as a diary of his time playing soccer. I am interested in the lives of other sportspeople so I find it fascinating.
Des Geraghty, vice-president of SIPTU
James Larkin: Lion of the Fold (Gill and Macmillan, £9.99) by Donal Levin is a beautifully illustrated book, and an extraordinarily well-documented compilation of the life of Larkin. It takes in a fantastic range of opinion on Larkin, a lot of history of the early Irish labour movement intertwining a lot of old poetry and song from the time too. Duggan's Destiny (Poolbeg, £7.99) by Seamus Martin is a picture of the last days of Daniel O'Connell, as seen through the eyes of his manservant. In this we see his dealings with women - the whole thing is dealt from a very human point of view. A nice little story with great insight. The Blooming Meadows - the World of Irish Music (Townhouse, £16.99) by Fintan Vallely and Charlie Piggott talks to people who play traditional music in little pictures of words, along with beautiful photographs.
Julie Parsons, author
Since I started writing fiction I am on the look-out for non-fiction stories. I loved A Perfect Storm (4th Estate, £6.99 in UK) by Sebastian Junger. It tells the tale of what happened to the ship, the Andrea Gail in the huge North Atlantic Storm in October 1991. It grips you to the end. There is an amazing description of drowning that would put you off choosing that as a method of dying. Cries Unheard - the Case of Mary Bell (Macmillan, £20 in UK) by Gitta Sereny is the controversial book written in conjunction with Bell, the woman who was convicted of the manslaughter of two boys in Newcastle when she was 11. She was sent to Styal Prison for about 10 years and was the youngest prisoner they ever had. Sereny is a fantastic storyteller. And my third book is On Gardening (Townhouse, £10.99) by Helen Dillon. You can dip into it any time and know what should be going on or what to plan for.
Bishop Pat Buckley, Tridentine cleric
My first choice is The She Pope: a Quest for the Truth behind the Mystery of Pope Joan (Heinemann, £16.99 in UK) by Peter Stanford, an exploration of the existence or not of this woman Pope. This is very readable, wellwritten, scholarly and packed full of facts. Irish Catholic Spirituality (Columba Press, Dublin, £5.99) by Father John J. O'Riordain is written by a redemptorist priest and it looks at spirituality in the old Celtic Catholic Church before it was taken over by the legalistic Roman Church. It is particularly concerned with the way we seem to have lost our old Celtic spirituality. And last, A Book of Hours and Other Catholic Devotions (Canterbury Press, £25.50) by Father Sean A. Finnegan, which is a collection of all the devotions and prayers I would have known when I was growing up in Dublin and Offaly. I was so happy to rediscover the old devotions, and it is a beautiful mix of traditional and liberalism.
Adrian Hardiman, senior counsel
I found The Life of Thomas Moore (Chatto and Windus, £20 in UK) by Peter Ackroyd a very readable biography of the 16th-century English lawyer, writer and saint executed by Henry VIII. Moore is portrayed as a determined, sometimes foul-mouthed, heretic hunter and controversialist as well as the silver-tongued humanist and author of Utopia. Eat the Rich (Picador, £16.99 in UK) by P.J. O'Rourke, is an "in your face" free marketeer's exploration of "why some places prosper and thrive, while others just suck". It is a mixture of root-and-branch vindication of the market system with economic travelogues to Albania, Sweden, Cuba, Russia and other places. It is full of hard words about the economics profession. Amsterdam by Jonathan Cape, £14.99 in UK) by Ian McEwan, won the Booker Prize, so it's unfashionable to confess having enjoyed it. It's an unpretentious, highly contemporary tale with no heroes, lots of angst, and an intriguing storyline touching on the power and immortality of the press.