Guy Martin: My Autobiography By Guy Martin Release date: 01st December, 2014 Publisher: Virgin Books List Price: £16.99 Our Price: £9.00 You Save: £7.99 (47%) Buy Now

Guy Martin’s autobiography has been one of the year’s sporting phenomena, selling in incredible numbers, thanks in part to his television appearances, but also to his engaging, boy-next-door persona. In many respects, his apparent devil-may-care attitude is one most of us lose once burdened with the increasingly heavy responsibilities of family, work, mortgage and so on, which perhaps explains why we enjoy reading about a man who avoids conformity. And this book, like much else that Martin presents to the public on TV and in his two other books, is non-conformist, opinionated, compelling and often very, very funny. It’s possible that readers will return to some passages and wonder whether this star of the Isle of Man TT races meant to re-emphasise a point he’s already made. Is he being pedantic or simply trying to fill up the page? An example: he details every bend, straight and corner (with speeds) from a road race in Ulster and goes on to explain that the location known as ‘The Hole In The Wall’ is so named because, well, "there’s a wall with a hole in it." Elsewhere, he provides an extremely amusing account of an ‘orgy’ he attended, although this is as far removed from the debauched, licentious gatherings frequented most weekends by kinky, cocaine-snorting types in New York as you could imagine. In Martin’s case, he kept his socks on (yes, really) and, he explains, matter-of-factly, "sat in the buff…on the wheel arch in the back of a Transit van eating a Mars Bar." Yet his straight-talking, come-day, go-day manner successfully disguises the amount of hard work Martin undertakes to ensure that whenever he straddles a high-performance motorbike, he’s taken as much risk out of propelling it at 170mph as he possibly can. He may come across as a man still in possession of a youthful, devil-may-care attitude, but there’s an awful lot of precision to Guy Martin as this excellent read makes abundantly clear.