The non-fiction paperbacks you should be reading this week: Jonathan Hollins, Julian Borger, Philip Norman

by Jonathan Hollins (Duckworth £10.99, 368pp) ON A dull Monday morning, Jonathan Hollins took a phone call telling him that one of his patients was dead.

This is never welcome news for a vet, but in this case the patient was a celebrity: a 200-year-old giant tortoise who appeared on the coinage of his home - the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena.

Fortunately, it turned out that the tortoise (also called Jonathan) was not dead, but sunbathing.

Jonathan (the vet) has spent much of his career tending creatures in some of the most beautiful and far-flung places on earth: the Falkland Islands and the rugged island outpost of Tristan da Cunha.

A wonderful warmth and geniality suffuses Hollins's enchanting memoir, as well as a remarkable resourcefulness in dealing with collapsing chickens and wayward reindeer.

by Julian Borger (John Murray, £10.99, 304pp) IN 1983, when Julian Borger was 22 years old, his father, Robert, took his own life.

When Julian broke the news to Nancy Bingley, the Welsh foster mother who cared for Robert when he arrived in Britain as an 11-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria , Nancy said, 'Robert was the Nazis' last victim'.

Years later, a chance conversation reminded Julian that his father's hazardous journey from Vienna to Wales began with a newspaper advertisement: 'I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11.'

There were many such heartbreaking advertisements, and Borger's haunting memoir traces the journeys of seven children who survived, only to learn in many cases that their families had perished.

Discovering their stories, and his own family history, helped Julian to understand his difficult, troubled father's final, tragic act.

by Philip Norman (Simon & Schuster, £12.99 560pp) GEORGE HARRISON died of cancer on November 29, 2001, aged just 58.

He had called himself 'the economy-class Beatle', but Philip Norman argues that although he might have been known as the 'quiet one' of the Fab Four, as a guitarist he belonged in the company of Sixties' guitar heroes such as Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

When George was born in 1943, his mother predicted that he would be special - and so it proved.

In this fascinating biography, Norman charts the intriguing contradictions of Harrison's life: his spirituality and serial philandering; the talent for friendship that saw him remain friends with Clapton after the Cream star fell in love with Harrison's then wife, Pattie Boyd; and his eclectic range of passions, from motor racing and gardening - 'flowers don't answer back', he said - to the ukulele.