Agatha Christie Laura Thompson (Headline Review, £8.99)

The life of the great detective story writer, told in the style of one of her mysteries. Thompson had access to family archives, and uses it to create a vivid portrait of Christie. The sections on her later life at Winterbrook, near Wallingford, where she moved with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Malloran, are particularly interesting for Oxfordshire readers, as is the revelation that Barbara Malloran - whom Max married shortly after Christie's death - continued to live in Wallingford until her own death in 1993.

Memories, Dreams and Reflections Marianne Faithfull (HarperPerennial, £8.99)

Another Wallingford connection comes with the second volume of memoirs of the ultimate rock chick, former girlfriend of the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, one-time heroin addict and the product of St Joseph's Convent School in Reading, where she was brought up by her mother. In later life she was reconciled with her father, a literature lecturer at Brazier's Park, an adult education college set in large grounds at the foot of the Chilterns, near Ipsden, where she visited him several times. As she says, it's a wonder that she's still alive, and singing.

Wonderful Today: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me Pattie Boyd (Headline Review, £7.99)

Pattie Boyd was a different kind of rock star muse, in that she was a model, so had no reason to compete and was able to be the passive housewife figure so desired by the sixties music rebels. Pattie, inspiration of George Harrison's Something and Eric Clapton's Layla, comes over in her book as a nice, ordinary girl, swept up into a different world at a young age. She describes discovering the Gothic rundown Friars Park, near Henley, which George bought for £140,000 and spent years lovingly restoring. The house, a former convent school which she says never felt like hers, was the scene of her seduction by Clapton, whom she eventually left as he descended into drug and alcohol addiction. They say that if you remember the sixties, you weren't there, but Pattie seems to have absolute recall.