Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, by John Collis (Warner Books, £7.99 in UK)

An unpromising title for what looks, on the face of it, like an unpromising project. But John Collis's introduction is reassuring. "We're not talking Nietzsche or even Stephen Hawking here," he says of his subject's music. "It's only rock'n'roll, albeit at the more cerebrally nutritious end of the spectrum." So far, so good: and when he kicks in with a lively look at the blues scene in Belfast in the late 1940s, a survey of the showband scene from the fresh perspective of one who wasn't actually there, and an irresistible action replay of the story of the hapless Belfast paint-sprayer who has been immortalised, in the inimitable fashion of newspapers, as "Van Plaque Row Man", we know we're in the presence of a seriously cool biographer. Great quotes - "I didn't know I was going to be watched," the unremittingly irascible Van once confessed. "All of a sudden I'm in the bloody circus" - and a terrific discography.