Simply Barbra
If you should find yourself with 48 hours to kill - maybe you're in A&E or waiting for a Trans-Penine Railway train - then you could do a lot worse than buy the audiobook of the autobiography of Barbra Streisand - and remember it's Stry-Sand, not Streiznd - My Name is Barbra, not to be confused with the album of the same name. Buy the hardback, by all means, but it's nearly 1,000 pages long and will set you back around £35, though you could use it as a weapon or to sit on. And you won't get Barbra reading it out herself in a very chatty, conversational way, that really adds to the story.
We're only on the childhood bit, the bit we usually skip so we can get to fame, fortune and indiscretion, but even that is fairly gripping: her father's early preventable death, her evil step-father who openly referred to her as ugly, her going out on the rob (we're paraphrasing, obviously) to finance trips from Brooklyn to Broadway theatres, making her own lipstick from stuff she found in her mother's bathroom... Just wait till we get to stardom, meeting Judy Garland, recording with Donna Summer, having a gay son and making a Star is Born... we're thinking of having a bubble perm in readiness for that bit.
Basically, much more gripping than you might imagine from a superstar autobiog - Vanity Fair says 'it leaves blood on the page', which could go either way - and with 48 hours of the stuff, you could treat yourself to it if you're going back home for Christmas and never have to speak to those people at all!
Published by Century