Going for Broke: Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Bank, by Judith Rawnsley (HarperCollins, £6.99 in UK)

A hugely instructive, exhaustively detailed and delightfully gossipy look behind the scenes of the drama which ensued when futures trader Nick Leeson went missing in February 1995, after losing £850 million of his employers' money. How could a bank which had once been the legal owner of Louisiana, and in which Napoleon III had held a personal account, have allowed a working-class boy who failed his A-level maths to bring it crashing to its knees as he swanned around Singapore dropping his trousers in topclass wine bars and bragging about his $10million a week profit rate? It's an incredible story, though Judith Rawnsley - an ex-Barings employee herself - maintains an incredibly stiff upper lip as she works her way through a litany of spectacularly bad deals and spectacularly bad hangovers