Reader's Choice

Drinking, A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp (Quartet Books, £6 in UK), is about love, alcohol, pain and the whole damn thing. Not just another testimony of "I am an alcoholic", Knapp's story makes you feel and understand her need and obsession with booze. She was and is a high-profile American journalist who chronicles her life with bare-all intimacy and humour, and evokes a powerful empathy in the reader for her secrecy, despair and the destructive relationships that went hand-in-hand with her drinking. There's no happy ever after - while she won her battle, many of her friends lost, which makes her tale all the more honest.