Committed Belgophile and road cycling obsessive Harry Pearson takes you on a journey across Flanders - through the lumpy horizontal rain, up the elbow-juddering cobbled inclines, past the fans dressed as chickens and the shop window displays of constipation medicines as he follows races big, small and even smaller, through one glorious, muddy spring. Ranging over 500 years of Flemish and European history, Pearson examines the characters, the myths and the rivalries that make Flanders a place where cycling is a religion and the riders its Lycra-clad priests.

For a race as long as the mighty Tour (three weeks of testing the limits of human endurance), to have the ultimate victory decided by a margin of just eight seconds almost boggles the mind. But that's exactly what happened between American legend Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon. After more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, it remains the smallest margin of victory in the Tour's 100-plus-year history.

A London cycle courier with a taste for adventure, Emily Chappell entered an extraordinary new race - The Transcontinental - in which riders must find their own way, entirely unassisted, across Europe in the shortest time possible. On her second attempt, she won the women's event, covering nearly 4,000 miles in 13 days and 10 hours, sleeping in short bursts wherever exhaustion took her. 

Cycling fans obsess about climbs and big mountains. They love reading about their tests and tribulations, and they love to ride them - a cricket lover can never bat at Lord's, or a football supporter score at Wembley, but any rider can take on the challenge of an iconic mountain. There have been fine books about the big climbs before but never from the voice of an elite GC winner, taking you inside what these climbs really feel like, where the attacks come, where the pain kicks in.

With a candid authority that comes from over 25 years commentating on the world's biggest cycling races, legendary Eurosport commentator Carlton Kirby isn't afraid to tell it like it really is. Witty, outrageous and often outspoken, Magic Spanner is an insider's view of life on cycling's Grand Tours, including the Tour de France, Giro D'Italia, Vuelta a España and the classics, all delivered in the inimitable style for which Carlton has become globally famous.   

In One-Way Ticket: Nine Lives and Two Wheels he describes a journey from driven teenage prodigy, travelling to races in the back of his dad's station wagon, to an obsessive determination to make it big in European racing - whatever the cost. He tells the story of his transformation from poacher to gamekeeper, detailing his painful decision to finally come clean about his own descent into doping - and to persuade others to do likewise - by providing more than enough shocking testimony to USADA (US Anti-Doping Agency) to explode the Armstrong myth.

Bernard Hinault is one of the greatest cyclists of all time. He is a five-time winner of the Tour de France and the only man to have won each of the Grand Tours on more than one occasion. Three decades on from his retirement, he remains the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France. His victory in 1985 marks the turning point when the nation who had dominated the first eight decades of the race they had invented suddenly found they were no longer able to win it.

Ned Boulting has noticed something. It's to do with bikes. They're everywhere. And so are their riders. Some of these riders seem to be sporting sideburns and a few of them are winning things. Big things. Now Ned wants to know how on earth it came to this. And what, exactly is 'this'. In On the Road Bike, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so obsessed with cycling. Ned’s search puts him in contact with some of the wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic people who have contributed to this nation’s two-wheeled history.

By his 18th birthday David Millar was living and racing in France, sleeping in rented rooms, tipped to be the next English-speaking Tour winner. A year later he'd realised the dream and signed a professional contract. He perhaps lived the high life a little too enthusiastically - he broke his heel in a fall from a roof after too much drink and before long the pressure to succeed had tipped over into doping.

In 2001, when the bible of the sport, Cycling Weekly, ran a poll to decide the greatest British cyclist, Chris Boardman's was the name that topped the list. It was Boardman's lone achievements in the '80s and '90s - Olympic track gold, the world hour record, repeatedly claiming the yellow jersey in the Tour de France - that lit the spark for modern British cycling. His endeavours both on and off the bike have made him the founding father of current golden generation - without him there would simply be no Hoy, Wiggins or Cavendish.

In Icons, Wiggins takes the listener on an extraordinarily intimate journey through the sport, presenting key pieces from his never-before-seen collection of memorabilia. Over the course of his illustrious career, he amassed hundreds of items - often gifts from its greatest and most controversial figures. Each reflects an icon, a race or a moment that fundamentally influenced Wiggins on both a personal and professional level.

The Call of the Road reveals the epic battles of all of the racing seasons since the first Tour de France, looking beyond the results to see the drama - not just on the road but within the teams and between individuals - and the politics and scandal that continue to fascinate cycle road race fans everywhere.

With The Rider, Tim Krabbé has created a book unique in the ranks of sporting literature. He describes one 150-kilometre race in just 150 pages. In the course of the narrative, we get to know the forceful, bumbling Lebusque, the aesthete Barthelemy, the Young Turk Reilhan, and the mysterious rider from Cycles Goff'. Krabbé battles with and against each of them in turn, failing on the descents, shining on the climbs, suffering on the (false) flats.

Vitaly Stepanov worked for the Russian anti-doping squad, committed to his job; Yuliya Rusanova was one of the country's most promising 800m athletes. When they met, he fell in love with her; she revealed she was taking performance-enhancing drugs. It could have been the end of their relationship, but instead they decided they would reveal the scale and the scope of the corruption in Russian athletics - the bribes, the drugs, the abuse. 

On 15 February 2008, Mark Beaumont pedalled through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. 194 days and 17 hours previously, he had begun his attempt to circumnavigate the world in record time. Mark smashed the Guinness World Record by an astonishing 81 days. He had travelled more than 18,000 miles on his own through some of the harshest conditions one man and his bicycle can endure, camping wild at night and suffering from constant ailments.