You don't need to be mad to work here, but it certainly helps

RACING:JOCKEYS ARE mad. We know this. We're told it at every turn by every good soul who comes into contact with them. What's often a far more elusive truth is why. Why are they mad? What right do they have to this madness? Are they born mad or is this madness thrust upon them?

It’s pretty rare for books to have the answer. Rarer still for books written by the jockeys themselves to throw a lot of light on the subject. Far too often the jockey autobiography jumps from season to season, from Cheltenham to Cheltenham, without passing on any great searing insight in the spaces in between.

Tony McCoy could tell you about such books – he'd already published two of the genre before he sat down with Donn McClean to write AP McCoy – My Autobiography(Orion Books, €26.40). The only reason he could justify having a third go at it would be if he had something to say about himself that he hadn't said before.

Thankfully, this is indeed the case.

He takes his time in getting there, but by the end of this excellent book we do have some idea of what it is that drives McCoy, of where the madness comes from.

There’s a level of self-awareness here you wouldn’t always have assumed he had – a sense that he does genuinely get how unreasonable his relentless search for winners has been since he first became champion jockey in 1996.

He freely admits it turned him into a robot for some of his career. Nothing mattered outside of riding winners, of keeping the tick-tock of numbers rolling ever along. It made him a hard person to be around and the pages where he deals with what he has put his wife Chanelle through over the years are among the hardest to read in the book.

In the end though, they’re of a piece with what is an honest and fascinating portrait of a man who managed to live a public life without anyone really getting a glimpse of what he thought the point of it all was. Here, finally, is the best effort at explaining him.

Paul Carberry couldn't be much more different from McCoy as a jockey if he tried. As you might expect, his book One Hell Of A Ride(Paperweight, €19.99) doesn't exactly plough the same land either.

Carberry points out himself a few times along the way that he “wouldn’t be much of a talker” – a character trait which you’d imagine didn’t endear him to his ghostwriter, Des Gibson, in the process of putting the book together.

The result is an often hilarious, if sometimes sketchy account of the life of the jockey the other jockeys like to say is the most naturally-talented in the weigh room.

Occasionally, it struggles to hang together as a coherent story and it’s pretty uneven in places. We find out nearly 250 pages in that he has a son and daughter from a previous relationship and even then each of them get just a sentence a apiece before we move briskly along. It jars because it comes so out of the blue and then he carries on as if he never even mentioned them.

But what carries the book and holds it together is the stories. For the most part, they’re drinking stories and for every one you’ve heard, Carberry has another three or four to go alongside it.

Yes, the one about riding the horse into the pub is in here, but so is the one about getting slapped in the face by a New York cop for tying the tails of two police horses together while he thought nobody was looking.

And the one about dancing in the rain in McCoy’s backyard during a thunderstorm at 4am one night, daring the heavens to hit him with a bolt of lightning. And countless more.

Carberry’s book is fun but there’s no great level of self-examination in it. He spends half the time claiming the drink never affected his ability to ride a winner but then says near the end that he’s convinced he’s having far more success these days because he’s given up drinking.

Sometimes baffling but for the most part enjoyable.

Not unlike the jockey himself.

The quadruped side of the yard is best represented this year by Brian O’Connor’s Ireland’s Greatest Racehorses (Aurum, €19.99).

The personal selection of this newspaper’s racing correspondent and columnist tells the stories behind a dozen of the most famous horses ever to be trained in this country.

Arkle is here, Sea The Stars too, Moscow Flyer, Nijinsky. Every one of them with a yarn behind them worth telling and worth hearing.

O’Connor knows the game too well though just to tell the horses’ stories. So much of what makes us interested in them is down to the people behind them. And so Istabraq’s story can’t be told without the men who saw talent in him when nobody else did – the late John Durcan, who was taken by cancer at just 31, a couple of months before the first of the great horse’s Champion Hurdles.

And Vintage Crop’s story is in many ways that of Dermot Weld and his insistence on doing things common consensus says should be impossible.

Written with O’Connor’s customary wit and style, it’s a book nobody with even the vaguest interest in Irish racing should be without.