GO INTO ANY BOOKSHOP and you will find more tortured souls in the sports section than over in the romantic poets. The shelves are littered with tomes of unremitting misery, from the badly-written morality tale to the debauched memoirs of the Priory generation.

There is something voyeuristic in reading these stories of celebrities gone awry and this summer plenty are available. By far the grimmest and most honest account is Paul McGrath’s Back From The Brink: The Autobiography (Arrow, £7.99/offer £7.59).

McGrath was a wonderful footballer and is a gentle, affable Irishman – until he has a drink. “I vividly remember the Stanley knife and the blood pouring on to the floor,” he writes in his harrowing account of alcoholism. “Come to think of it, I remember the au pair’s scream, too.”

McGrath’s drink problem is well known within football, but few recognised the depth of the depressions or the trauma of the mental breakdown that left him grinding bacon and egg into his hair and with knees stuck together from months lying in a zombified state.

The nadir was slashing his wrists while his baby son, Christopher, lay in the same room. McGrath’s subject matter may be bleak, but the writing is better than most sports books, and contributions from Sir Alex Ferguson and others help to shed light on one of the last great sporting taboos – mental illness.

Wasted, by Paul Smith (Know The Score, £16.99/ £15.29 ) is not in the same league in terms of writing. The former Warwickshire cricketer, whose life unravelled after he received a drugs ban in 1997, has produced a mishmash of a defence. Substance abuse in his life, style abuse in his prose, Smith’s book is nevertheless absorbing as he covers drug addiction, homelessness and his rebirth working with youths in downtown Los Angeles.

If some sportsmen have been seduced by success, the subject of In Search of Robert Millar, by Richard Moore (Harper Sport, £15.99/£14.39) provides the counterpoint. Millar, possibly Britain’s best cyclist, comes across as a deep-thinking, taciturn and embittered man. Moore is a gifted writer who covers the failed drugs test, Tours de France, sex-change rumours and “escape from Scotland” with panache, culminating in a captivating e-mail exchange with the reclusive Millar.

There is some truth in the notion that weakness reveals men and that is part of the appeal of these books – but if you now feel like hitting the absinthe there are happier books to enjoy. One is A Very British Coop by Mark Collings (Macmillan, £12.99/£11.69), which celebrates the quirky outsiders of working-class sport.

It is an account of a year in the life of Britain’s pigeon racers and at its centre is Les Green, the gloriously foul-mouthed head of a team called The Mafia who appears to have wandered in from the set of an X-rated Wallace and Gromit. In its very English eccentricity, it is a direct descendant of Simon Garfield’s The Wrestling, an erudite examination of why fat men would wear leotards and breastplates in Batley Town Hall.

Tent Boxing, by Wayne McLennan (Granta, £11.99/ £10.79) also deals in those on the fringes, this time in boxing booths in remote areas of Queensland. This is an elegiac account of a dying profession in which McLennan’s work as a referee and roustabout raises questions about race, violence and community.

Like Tent Boxing, John Feinstein shuns the elite in his new book, instead focusing on the thousand or so hopefuls who take part in the PGA tour qualifying tournament. Tales From Q School (Sphere, £18.99/£17.09) has its moments, detailing with some poignancy the dreams of has-beens and never-weres, but it is not as captivating as the best of Feinstein, who has become a prolific master of the behind-the-scenes book.

Let’s finish by leaving the trauma ward. Tom Cartwright: The Flame Still Burns (Fairfield Books, £16/£14.40) is a loving account of the Warwickshire player who scored 10,000 runs and took 1,000 wickets. Neither a fallen star nor a man on the periphery, Cartwright, who died this year, was the brilliant coach of the young Ian Botham. Stephen Chalke gives him the epitaph he deserves with his usual understated grace.

Buy the books here

Celebrity Choice: Matthew Hoggard, England cricketer

People always think I’m going to be a big reader of sports books, but for me reading is about getting away from it all, so I tend to prefer something that takes my mind away from the day job. Especially on holiday. But my favourite game-playing read has been BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE, by Ben Mezrich, a fantastic story of a group of students who cleaned up on the card tables of Las Vegas.

Matthew Hoggard is preparing for the npower Test series against India, which starts at Lord’s on July 19

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