Ten Celebrities Bios to fill your stockings with this Christmas

The celebrity bio is the zombie type of publishing. It was declared dead back in 2014 when large improvements paid to Stephen Fry and John Cleese, among others, failed to translate into sales. But every Christmas a new crop of shambling, rambling life tales -- all about 300 pages long and all about? 20 -- lurch onto the shelves, marketing themselves as easy presents for lazy or uninspired givers.

Sometimes a new spin is needed. Dawn French, Brian Blessed and Paul O'Grady have all published autobiographies already -- four volumes in O'Grady's case. Coincidentally, he and Blessed have come plan the wheeze of writing about their pets.

O'Grady's Country Life (Bantam,? 10, Acquire it now) is a handsomely produced and prettily photographed chunter through the television presenter's Kentish menagerie, interspersed with recipes, observations on the passing seasons and minor gripes about rural life. It's inoffensive pap, rather better than Blessed's booming, chortling, barking account of the animals he's lived or worked with, The Panther in Our Kitchen (Pan Macmillan,? 9. 50, Buy it now).

French's awkwardly-punctuated Me. You (Penguin,? 11. 99, Purchase it now) is a weird mishmash of diary and self-help book. The reader is invited to record his (or much more likely, her) inner thoughts alongside the comedian's advice how to love oneself and cure bereavement, divorce, infertility or turning 40. Is actually a fairly grisly read, with French's jolly strengthen queasily at odds with the therapy-speak. But she too seems to have happened on a trend.

Fellow comedian Sarah Millican's How to Be Champion (Orion,? 10, Purchase it now) also couches itself as helpful information for surviving life. It's actually an extremely raw account of triumphing over childhood poverty, romantic disappointment and low self-esteem through sheer bloody drive and effort. As they say, tragedy is easy: comedy is hard.

Rather cheerier is Anna Faris's Untrained (HarperCollins,? 12, Buy it now) which takes the title from the self-help podcast for which the Scary Superstar has latterly become known. Faris dol out advice about love and relationships from the perspective of a Showmanship hottie hitting 40, who has slept with precisely several people, and whose talismanically loved-up marriage to the fifth, Chris Pratt, just lately ended.

Pratt provides a rather touching foreword to an e book that turns out to be a great time. It's frank and amusing about both sex and the entertainment industry, and moving when Faris creates about her parents, Pratt, and the premature labor and birth and early problems of their son Jack.

He Lucas is honest upward to a point in Little Me, My Life from A-Z (Canongate,? ten, Buy it now), an account of how a good Jewish boy from finchley turned being fat, gay and lesbian and bald (thanks to alopecia) into a comedy career. But the details of his two-year marital life to TV producer Kevin McGee, and McGee's subsequent suicide, are plainly still too raw for your pet to go into. Fair enough. Sadly, the book lacks the anarchic zeal that Lucas brought to his work with Jesse Walliams, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. It's flabbily written: the chapter on Lucas's favourite food is filler in every sense of the word.

David Jason, having already written his life story, will serve up Only Fools and Stories (Century,? 10, Purchase it now), a moribund but inoffensive trot through the TV roles that made him famous: Delete Boy, Pop Larkin, Ice and Granville the grocery store. That's quite an impressive quatern, and though you'd need to be a real lover to slog through these pages of anecdotage, Jason at least comes across as a nice guy.

Harder to like is Rich Branson, whose second volume of autobiography Finding My Virginity (Virgin,? 17, Buy it now) is an account of what the dramón entrepreneur has been upwards to in the 21st century. There are name-drops galore (Mandela, Obama, Steve Jobs), a self-serving review of his businesses and his feats of derring-do, and a soupy depiction of himself as a loving son, spouse, father and now "grand-dude" (bleurgh). His repeated jape of upending women at press launches and publicity stunts reads strangely in the wake of Weinstein.

For balance, Reggie Yates's Unseen: My Journey (BBC Books,? 13, Buy it now) is definitely an introspective work in which the acting professional and presenter uses his recent documentaries on contest, sexuality, violence and skin image to reflect on his own personality. He will remind us how uncommon it remains for black, working-class people like himself to gain such prominence.

To the sports stars. Jenson Switch comes across as a cold fish in Life to the Limit (Blink,? 10, Buy it now), an ungracious account of his rise from go-karting to Formula 1 winner to retirement with a Playboy model in LOS ANGELES. I suspect this most repetitive of sports attracts the unreflective and single-minded, and breeds in them a sense of entitlement.

Button's world couldn't be more different to that of Olympic cyclist (and alopecia sufferer) Joanna Rowsell Shand. Complete Circle (Bonnier,? 14. 99, Buy it now) is a vivid if abysmally written litany of punishing training sessions, grisly accidents and finish-line vomiting. Right after winning Olympic gold she pees in a container for a random medicine test and eats junk food alone.

For those who have virtually any concerns with regards to wherever along with how to make use of net worth and today's birthday, you are able to contact us on the web site. Finally, Rio Ferdinand's Thinking Aloud (Hodder,? seven. 99, Buy it now) is a lacerating account of how the footballer fell apart after his wife, the mother of his three young children, died of breast tumor aged 34. This agonizing but necessary book is written with the Mom or dad journalist Decca Aitkenhead, who has herself lost someone.

Not very Christmassy, perhaps, but probably the best way to spend your cash in the celeb market this year.