Boogie Man: the adventures of John Lee Hooker by Charles Shaar Murray (Viking, £18 in UK). Trying to pin down the life of a blues singer is harder than trying to scoop up quicksilver with a pair of chopsticks, but Shaar Murray makes a fascinating fist of it in this gutsy voyage into black America and its music, following the man who was "born with the blues" from his humble beginnings as the son of a sharecropper and part-time preacher to superstardom - and beyond.
Camille SaintSaens: A Life by Brian Rees (Chatto, £36 in UK). This lively study of the man who began as a child prodigy and ended as an icon is vivid, discursive and very, very French. Ranging across a vast and varied landscape of musical forms, from opera to chamber music, operetta to symphony, Rees credits SaintSaens with being the first to blend French folksong and music from the Arab world into the classical tradition.
Concerto Conversations, by Joseph Kerman (Harvard, £15.50 in UK). Where many classical music "self-help" books are faintly condescending in tone, this one tends towards the inspirational as Kerman swoops joyously on the concerto and exposes the drama of its shimmering textures, pounding rhythms and high-tension dialogues between soloist and orchestra. Comes with a 68-minute CD in which, among other treats, Radu Lupu plays Schubert, Martha Argerich plays Liszt and Kyung-Wha Chung plays Prokofiev.
Cinderella and Company by Manuela Hoelterhoff (Vintage, £7.99 in UK). Opera? Soap opera, more like. If you're even vaguely curious about opera you'll be gripped by this superb snapshot of the contemporary scene: in the course of an eventful year backstage with the vivacious Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli, Hoelterhoff came across all the top tonsils of our times, and she writes about them with arresting immediacy and a wicked sense of humour. What's Welsh for Zen by John Cale (Victor Books, £18 in UK). Like the man himself, this large-format, wackily-illustrated autobiography is wild, woolly and quite, quite wonderful.
