IF YOU EVER thought that Wyoming - laconic voices, stoic attitudes, high plains and the wind-dried folks - was invented in the fiction of Annie Proulx, you have only to read, as a corrective to any such delusion, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller (Simon & Schuster, buy it here), the short, exploi-ted life of a roughneck oil rigger, a “K-Mart cowboy” betrayed partly by his own optimistic, innocent idealism and partly by the unbridled greed of boom times and city oil-slickers.

Fuller writes like a novelist, but her story is true and tragic. Colton H. Bryant needed, in his small-time way, to follow the money, to take care of his family - and paid a terrible price.

Also novelistic in tone is a fat, gold-hatted airport blockbuster, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder (Bloomsbury, buy it here) who is frankly bedazzled by the billionaire Buffett, financier and family man, and his rise to riches, fame, power and philanthropy. It's a razzle-dazzle ride from Buffett's birth in Omaha a year after the Wall Street crash of 1929 to his global reputation today as the “Oracle of Omaha”, the counterintuitive oligarch of Berkshire Hathaway who buys low, sells high. It's the secret of life.

It may come as a surprise that writers have anything as defined as a career, but So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (4th Estate, buy it here) shows that Fitzgerald, the biographer and novelist, took her life and her writing seriously, as an opportunity to put across her view of the world. That world is illuminated by her attitude to family, friends and the difficulties not only of literature (“How do you think of a novel?” she once asked A.S. Byatt) but of literary society and the bane of its glittering prizes.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

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Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass (Bloomsbury, buy it here) precedes A Life in Pictures, an autobiography to be published next year. Glass proposed himself as Gray's Boswell and Gray plays up perfectly as a latter-day Johnson - this time, a Scots one, to even out Johnson's allergy to Scotland and the Scots. Gray, almost single-handedly and single-mindedly, enabled the current wave of Scottish art and writing, and Glass enables and enriches his grouchy, gleeful, touchy and triumphant subject whose aim in life seems to consist in “having my way”. He's earned it: long may he have it.

The great thing about a cultural icon is that he can be forever rediscovered, reinvented and recast in the drama of his life. Casanova by Ian Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton, buy it here) does all these things for his hero - priest, lover, actor, writer, philosopher, spy, gourmet and gourmand, rich man, poor man, jailbird and genius - with a brio and confidence that would do credit to the great charlatan himself. It is tempting to think that some of Casanova's DNA was mixed with that of Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg. In The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe by Timothy Snyder (Bodley Head, buy it here ), what we now call “sexual diversity” (in Wilhelm's case, a taste for transvestism, tattoos and Tom, Dick and Harry) is combined with an aristocratic attitude, a playboy manner and a distaste for totalitarianism that resulted in his death under Soviet interrogation, in 1947, as a spy for Britain. Snyder's biography brilliantly baits his readers with a glittering subject to teach them historical and political truths about 20th-century Europe.

This is Not About Me by Janice Galloway (Granta, buy it here): oh, yes it is: the sharp satire of Galloway, a novelist who hones her voice and tunes her ear to the sounds and sensations of her wary childhood years in the grim seaside town of Saltcoats, just south of Glasgow, gives acid colour to the chilling, tragi-comic characters of her older sister Cora and her mother, who mistook her pregnancy with Janice for the menopause.

Role models can be difficult acts to follow: My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt (Virago, buy it here) is an outrageously entertaining memoir of hero-worship. It could have been even more difficult: the three-year-old Boyt could have opted for the Virgin Mary instead of a diva, but glamour was more seductive, and in later life her devotion to Garland proved unexpectedly positive. If you are possessed by an inner voice, it may as well be a great one.

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