IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the world of sport lacks great novels, although it might just as easily be asked whether sport needs them. As David Baddiel debated on these pages recently, what scriptwriter could have come up with a better climax to the season than John Terry, the Chelsea captain, stepping up to take the penalty to win the European Cup and slipping on to his backside?

Likewise, could Joe McGinnis have invented The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro (Time Warner, £10.99/offer £10.80) even if he had wanted to? Not for nothing is his wonderful book subtitled “a real life footballing fairytale”. Telling of the season that he, an American crime writer, spent with the team from a tiny hamlet in Italy that found itself launched into the professional leagues, it is, as the blurb says, “populated by characters only the passionate, frenetic, absurd world of sport can produce”. And there are few more absurd worlds than Italian football, where referees are nobbled, matches fixed and fans riot.

McGinnis charms his way into the lives of these underdog footballers and produces one of the most spectacular hit-and-runs in the history of sports journalism. An American magazine asked him to return to Italy several years later to report how the team were getting on. It is no surprise to hear that he was run out of town.

“Nine men set out to race each other round the world. Only one made it back,” proclaims the cover of A Voyage for Madmen (Profile, £8.99/£8.54) by Peter Nichols: the sort of Hollywood pitch that invites you to put on a deep, gravelly voice. “The rest encountered despair, sublimity, madness and death.” As a summary of this thrilling tale of the 1968 Golden Globe around-the-world yacht race, it is not much of an exaggeration.

Has there ever been a more tragic figure in all of British sport than Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who found himself out of his depth in every sense and spent weeks hiding in the Bay of Biscay while pretending that he was battling through the Southern Ocean? When his ruse was discovered, he suffered a breakdown and his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was found abandoned. Nichols tells the story of Crowhurst, and of the rest of these bold adventurers, so vividly that you can feel the spray in your face.

From the Times Archive: A 1971 nnouncement of Peter Nichols' play 'Forget-Me-Not Lane'

It is not a book that requires you to know your port from your starboard any more than Gordon Burn's Best and Edwards (Faber, £8.99/£8.54) demands an affiliation to Manchester United or a love of football. Indeed, the great strength of Burn's book is that he has brought a wider perspective, a novelist's scope, to the stories of Duncan Edwards, killed in the 1958 Munich air crash, and George Best. If only football could attract more writers such as Burn, who manages to bring fresh insight to Best (no mean achievement) while interpreting Bobby Charlton's ever-present frown.

It takes a writer of real skill to weave two lives together and Donald McRae also manages it superbly with In Black and White (Scribner, £7.99/£7.59), the untold story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. A denser, more historical work than the other recommendations, nevertheless it is told at a pace that will keep you gripped. Like Burn, McRae does not just bring us the wins and losses of great sportsmen but their wider impact. Which is considerable in the case of Louis and Owens, the great black heroes in a world not ready for civil rights.

If you prefer a book from which to dip in and out, the Ian Wooldridge anthology Searching for Heroes (Hodder, £8.99/£8.54) is a fine companion. With so much of today's sportswriting featuring strident opinion, it is uplifting, cleansing even, to enjoy the human touch of Wooldridge, the late, great doyen of the Daily Mail. In Kinshasa after the Rumble in the Jungle he wrote: “The sun had the audacity to rise over Central Africa yesterday while Mr Muhammad Ali was still speaking.” There are many more lines which make the rest of us feel like giving up.

From the Times Archive: The 1978 review of 'The Best of Wooldridge' a collection by Ian Wooldridge

I have managed to go a whole sports book review, almost, without mentioning David Peace's The Damned Utd (Faber, £7.99/£7.59), which stirred so much praise that there has been a backlash. Ignore the carpers, it is the bravest and most thrilling novel written about sport in this country, quite possibly anywhere. I say novel although, this being sport, it is founded on an extraordinary reality; specifically Brian Clough's combustible life.

Matt Dickinson is Chief Sports Correspondent of The Times and in 2006 was Specialist Correspondent of the year.

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