The Time Has Come: Ger McDonnell – His Life and Death on K2 by Damien O’Brien, The Collins Press, £17.99

The title of this book has two meanings. On August 1st, 2008, Limerick-born Ger McDonnell became the first Irishman to conquer K2, possibly the most dangerous mountain in the world. The next day, a cascading series of avalanches killed the robust 37-year-old and 10 other international climbers. Several of them, including McDonnell, found themselves stranded on the higher slopes after their fixed ropes were torn away and there was no comparatively safe way down from the “zone of death”.

So the book, written by McDonnell’s brother-in-law, is a celebration of a life-loving Irish adventurer who fulfilled his dream – and died for it. But the time has also come for McDonnell’s family to set the record straight on his fate, the truth of which came to light only because several of them travelled to Pakistan and painstakingly assembled the full story by interviewing survivors and gathering photographic evidence.

Rather than becoming disorientated by lack of oxygen before being killed in a fall, which was the initial testimony of an Italian survivor, McDonnell deliberately used his remaining time to rescue two Koreans and a Sherpa climber who had been left hanging on their ropes overnight. In an act of true heroism, the Irishman climbed above the stranded trio and managed to transfer them to new ropes, only then to be killed by a cascade of falling ice. And, in a further tragic turn of events, the three he saved subsequently died in fresh avalanches before they could get off the mountain.

The narrative structure of this account is clunky at times, with each chapter pointlessly cutting between the dramatic events on K2 and McDonnell’s life before his death on the mountain. A more linear approach would have heightened the build-up. There is also an over-reliance on long quotes from other climbers. But the author still provides plenty of dramatic food for thought, and one can’t help but be moved by the book’s often dazzling selection of colour photographs. Kevin Sweeney

A Natural Woman: A Memoir by Carole King. Vintage, £18

Carole King began writing hit songs in her teens. As jobbing songwriters, she and her cowriter (and first husband), Gerry Goffin, delivered some of the most enduring songs of the 20th century, almost on demand, for The Shirelles (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?) and Aretha Franklin (You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman). When King was eventually cajoled into recording and singing her own material, she delivered Tapestry, an era-defining record that would sell 25 million copies; it remains one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. The album, with that iconic cover photograph of King in jumper and jeans in her Laurel Canyon retreat, helped create the singer-songwriter sound of the early 1970s.

Few were as blessed as King when it came to songwriting craft and old-fashioned musicality. But while others hogged the spotlight, King’s choice was always to remain in the shadows or at home – preferably both. Tellingly, she did not turn up to accept her Grammy award for Tapestry, preferring to mind her kids back at home in New York. When she visited a war-torn Belfast in 1972 her suggested panacea for the Troubles was to put the mothers in charge.

This focus on domestic bliss is at the heart of her memoir. King’s core value, she says, is that she just wants everyone to be happy. It makes for an earnest, well-meaning book, but hardly one that will match Keith Richards’s Life for excitement.

That said, King’s book is not uninteresting. Her quest for what she calls “home”, through four marriages and two subsequent relationships, is engaging. Her account of the physical abuse she endured from her second husband, Rick Evers, is shocking.

On the journey, there are some rock’n’roll nuggets: John Lennon is obnoxious because he feels intimidated by King’s songwriting power; Joni Mitchell sketches portraits of King’s daughters; King recalls how fearless Bono was in improvising ideas at Hanover Quay in Dublin. There is more on James Taylor (a key inspiration), Bob Dylan, Don Henley, David Crosby and the rest.

Through it all, there’s the sense that King, the regular Jewish girl from Brooklyn, is something of an observer, rather than a key participant, in the formative years of rock’n’roll. Clearly, she is a modest and empathetic person. You will warm to her after reading this memoir; just don’t expect her to dish the dirt. Seán Flynn

Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd. Chatto Windus, £12.99

Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), as well as 19 other novels and 17 plays, was a funny little man by all accounts, generous in ways yet often mean with money. He never married yet supported two mistresses and made frequent trips to Europe, particularly Italy and France, and even toured the US. Ill health plagued him from his earliest years, yet he emerges, even from a short biography as slipshod as this hasty concoction, as good-humoured and likable.

Although Peter Ackroyd seems to be on autopilot here, he cannot help making pertinent points, such as the fact that Collins was a creator of plots, not of characters. Ackroyd also makes a convincing case for Heart and Science (1883), a late and neglected work.

Ackroyd has always been terrific at evoking Victorian London, but he appears here to be going through the motions. The prose is sloppy, surprisingly clause-ridden and cliched, and the narrative is often repetitive, which is all very distracting and disappointing, because Ackroyd is an imaginative writer who has a feel for period detail and nuance. His passionate 1990 biography of Dickens spans 1,083 well-researched and lively pages, in which Collins features frequently.

Dickens, the literary giant of the age, befriended Collins, 12 years his junior. They worked and holidayed together, and Collins’s brother married Dickens’s daughter, to the novelist’s disdain.

Throughout this brief biography, Ackroyd appears to be juggling material he knows by heart. Aside from the book’s appearance of being rushed, it may simply be true that any work in which Dickens appears ends up dominated by him. It happens here, with Ackroyd’s sickly and invariably fatigued Collins constantly overwhelmed by the restless, domineering Dickens.

Now Collins has got a biographer in a hurry; he deserves better, particularly from Ackroyd, who has written so many wonderful works, including The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Hawksmoor (1986) – with its shades of Wilkie Collins – not forgetting biographies of Blake and TS Eliot as well as Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002). Eileen Battersby