Galaxy ® British Book Awards

"My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents." With bulimia, self-harm, heroin addiction, sex addiction and spells in rehab to his name, it's a miracle that Brand survived it all to tell the tale himself, but tell it himself he does, in his own distinctive voice. From his troubled childhood in Essex, raised by a single mother, to his swift ascent through the world of entertainment while trawling the underbelly of London street life, this is not simply a story of fame but also of redemption, told throughout with searing honesty ("I am a bit mad") and Brand's outlandish sense of humour that has won him fans at gigs and on chat shows around the world.
Hodder, hardback, £18.99

"I hope it comes over that, despite everything, we were always able to have a laugh." These were Tony Blair's words on hearing that former aide Alastair Campbell was to publish extracts from his diaries of their time together, and they emphasise the close working relationship the two men enjoyed. The Blair Years contains 350,000 of the more than two million words Campbell penned throughout the decade he spent working alongside the man who transformed the Labour Party. It is a story of politics in the raw, of progress and setback, of reputations made and destroyed under the relentless scrutiny of a 24-hour media. By turns light-hearted and painful, Campbell gives us a behind-the-scenes look at a leadership that was "not afraid to use power to make change".
Hutchinson, hardback, £25

Clarissa Dickson Wright was born into wealth and privilege. As a child, shooting and hunting were the norm for her, with her mother, an Australian heiress, and her father, a surgeon to the Royal family. But life was far from perfect; her father had alcoholic tendencies while her mother died suddenly when Dickson Wright was in her twenties, leaving the promising young lawyer to spend a decade wildly partying away her fortune. It was a long road to recovery, along which she faced her demons and turned to the one thing that had always brought her joy - cooking. She found fame alongside the late Jennifer Paterson as one half of the much loved TV cooking partnership, Two Fat Ladies.
Hodder, hardback, £18.99

When Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond suffered a near-fatal high-speed car crash in September 2006, he made all the front pages as the nation collectively held its breath. Miraculously, Hammond pulled through, escaping long-term brain damage to make a full recovery and a triumphant return to the small screen. On the Edge is Hammond and his wife Mindy's compelling joint recollection of life before and after the accident, and of the recuperation in hospital and at home. The book is particularly revealing in its description of the alarming physical and mental effects of Hammond's head injury and illustrates just how extraordinary his recovery is. On the Edge was a Sunday Times number one bestseller for two months.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardback, £18.99

One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. Dashing and louche, courageous and unpredictable, inside the traitor was a hero, inside the villain, a man of conscience - but where one ended and the other began, few could tell. Gagged by the Official Secrets Act, Chapman's own memoirs were incomplete. MacIntyre, whose interest in Chapman stemmed from reading his obituary in The Times, weaves together diaries, letters, photographs and top-secret MI5 files to create a comprehensive account of a man who "achieved a certain greatness, but in ways that were far from conventionally good."
Bloomsbury, paperback, £7.99