Muammar Gaddafi's demise in Sirte last October was the ugliest of any of the dictators toppled by the uprisings of the Arab spring. Tunisia's and Egypt's deposed leaders  24 and 30 years in power to Gaddafi's record 42  got away with gilded exile and a humiliating trial respectively; Yemen's veteran president was pushed into retirement. Regime change in Libya was always likely to be brutish. The events that led up to the Brother Leader's bloody end are quite a story.

Lindsey Hilsum was in all the right places to tell it now  in Benghazi when the revolution erupted in February 2011; in Tripoli when the regime fell in August; and in the ruins of Misrata to see Gaddafi's rotting corpse on display in a vengeful parody of a traditional lying-in-state. Sandstorm is an impressive combination of vivid reporting and cool analysis from the veteran Channel 4 foreign correspondent. But what makes her book so useful is that she zooms out from the day-to-day drama to explain how Libya was different: its tribal society, small population, vast oil wealth, nonexistent or stunted institutions, routine repression and, above all, the wacky, capricious ruler who presided over it for so long.

Gaddafi came to be seen in the west as a vicious buffoon with a penchant for comic-opera uniforms, female bodyguards and ranting speeches  as well as for antics such as arming the IRA, giving anti-colonialism a bad name by bankrolling some of Africa's most noxious tyrants, and carrying out the Lockerbie bombing.

Libyans concentrated on what he did (or failed to do) back home in the Jamahiriya  his own Arabic neologism for "state of the masses". His utopian vision was set out in the unreadable Green Book  full of ideas that were "derivative and discredited". Hilsum describes doomed efforts by brave opposition activists to overthrow Gaddafi as well as the notorious massacre in 1996 of 1,270 prisoners in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. Relatives of those victims mounted the protest that sparked the Benghazi uprising.

Sandstorm looks closely at the years after 2003 when Gaddafi, rattled by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, surrendered his WMD arsenal. The old pariah became a valued new ally in the west's "war on terror", cooperating with the CIA and MI6 to hunt down Libyan jihadis. Later, some of these emerged, reborn as Islamist democrats, Tripoli's new rulers  along with embarrassing documents about rendition and torture.

For Britain and other western countries, Gaddafi's open stance meant business opportunities galore, especially contracts in an oil industry recovering from years of sanctions. Hopes were invested in the efforts of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's LSE-educated and supposedly reformist-minded son, whose star faded as returning Libyan exiles found that for all the smooth talk he was not able to deliver fundamental change. For, Hilsum writes, as it emerged from isolation the Libyan regime became "less of a dictatorship and more of a mafia state". US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks made this clear.

So a peaceful transition was never an option. In a fateful speech in February, Saif pledged to defend his father's regime "to the last bullet" against the "greasy rats" who had the temerity to oppose it. Days later, when troops shot down demonstrators in Tripoli, one man Hilsum interviewed saw the light: "It dawned on me that it would not be like Egypt or Tunisia. Gaddafi wouldn't stop. Those countries had pseudo-democracies but we had nothing. So we quickly took the path of armed conflict."

Hilsum gives a riveting account of the battle for Tripoli, with activists risking their lives to pass intelligence to Nato, whose targeting  contrary to regime propaganda  was largely accurate, and too cautious for many Libyans. But there is disappointingly little about decision-making in western capitals or how it was coordinated with the wealthy and ambitious Qataris, who maintained their own lines of communication to Islamist rebel brigades rather than the National Transitional Council. Part opportunism, part luck, this was intervention "lite", conducted without the risk of putting "boots on the ground" (except for small numbers of deniable special forces). It seems unlikely to be repeated anywhere else  and certainly not in Syria  as the Arab spring runs its increasingly grim course.

Alex Crawford, a special correspondent for Sky News, made headlines covering the uprising in Zawiya and riding with the rebels into Tripoli, scooping the massed battalions of the BBC. She won praise for her nerve and determination and writes candidly in Colonel Gaddafi's Hat (HarperCollins, £14.99) about the irreconcilable conflict between an addictive job and her children and husband at home. Hers is a fast-paced story that captures the excitement and fear as well as the boredom of the hotels where journalists were forced to stay to be lied to by regime minders.

Ordinary Libyans play a bigger role in Tripoli Witness (Gilgamesh, £9.95), by the British-Lebanese journalist Rana Jawad, who worked undercover for the BBC Arabic service. Jawad had noticed over the years that Libyans had "no sense that change was possible or that they could do anything to alter the direction of their lives". Gaddafi's international rehabilitation did not make much difference to them: behind the gleaming new towers on Tripoli's waterfront the streets were still potholed and filthy, the health and education systems catastrophic. It was, she writes, "the memories of the dead, the oppressed and the shunned that ultimately sparked the Libyan uprising". It's no surprise that the new dawn has been marred by revenge killings.

All three books  part of a steady stream on the events of the last year across the Middle East and north Africa  agree that Gaddafi's largely unlamented departure brought exhilaration, an unfamiliar sense of empowerment and profound uncertainty about the future. In Arabic, "revolution" (thawra) rhymes neatly with "chaos" (fowda). But that's another  unfinished  story..

Few of us had much clue what we would find as we drifted past a deserted border post into a country run for as long as I could remember by a man regarded as part monster, part clown. What would these newly liberated areas of Libya, under the shaky control of the fledgling revolutionary government, be like after 42 years in the grip of Muammar Gaddafi? Some of what we found as reporters was of little surprise. Accounts of life under tyranny ranged from bitter recollections of persecutions and public hangings of dissidents to the necessary demonstrations of acquiescence through conformities such as the requirement that all the shop shutters be painted green.

But it was also swiftly clear in the early days of the Libyan revolution that here was an uprising, and a people, in many ways different to what was shaking other parts of the Arab world. Having thrown off the yoke of fear, Libyans in Benghazi and other newly liberated areas seemed almost ashamed at having put up with the old dictator for so long. And so they set about to redeem themselves with a courage and determination they could scarcely believe they had found. There would be no compromise.

Two books by distinguished television correspondents  Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News and Alex Crawford of Sky News  capture the drama of those uncertain days, as popular revolution morphed into armed conflict. Hilsum, in her masterful account, draws on pre-revolutionary visits to Tripoli, where she encountered a fearful and sullen population, as well as her reporting of the uprising and more recent research to produce an account with historical depth to match dramatic reportage.

At the centre of it all, of course, is Gaddafi. Hilsum captures the delusions of one of the last members of a breed  the president for life  that has largely disappeared from the rest of Africa, although the self-styled "Brother Leader" maintained he was merely guiding the people. He appears to have been sincerely baffled by the popularity of the uprising.

Sandstorm recounts life under Gaddafi through the moving and sometimes chilling accounts of his subjects. It's a country where fans could only refer to football players by number, not name, in case one of them became more popular than the Brother Leader. The exception was one of the dictator's brutal sons, Saadi, who fancied himself as a great midfielder and was appointed captain of the national squad. He also appeared  as a substitute  for an Italian club under, as Hilsum puts it, "a rare deal whereby the player pays the team".

Saadi played his own part in the steady stream of resentments that saw Benghazi become the crucible of revolution. Alongside the horror of the public hangings of students at the city's university, there was the less gruesome but deeply resented bulldozing of the local football club facilities by Saadi after fans paraded a donkey kitted out in a football shirt sporting his number.

Hilsum's disgust shines through as she recounts how the west embraced Gaddafi. The man who armed the IRA and was blamed for the Lockerbie atrocity became so acceptable in European capitals for a time that the director of MI6's counter-terrorism division could call one of the dictator's chief murderers and torturers "a friend". In public, Tony Blair embraced Gaddafi. In private Britain delivered up the Brother Leader's opponents for imprisonment and torture.

So what changed? For weeks, Libyans watched in awe as Tunisians kindled what became known as the Arab spring and then Egyptians declared Cairo's Tahrir Square liberated territory. In Benghazi, they only dared hope that such a thing could happen in Libya. As it turned out, the fuse was lit by the arrest of a lawyer acting on behalf of relatives of political prisoners massacred by the military years earlier. (Hilsum captures the horror of their slaughter and the trauma of their families.)

That spark set off the most extensive revolution of the lot. While Egypt's military continued to manipulate the democratic process and the new Tunisian leadership attempted to purge the new order of the old, Libya's uprising morphed into civil war and a fitting end for Gaddafi, dragged from hiding in a drainpipe and shot without ceremony. Hilsum does not gloss over the darker side of the rebels. Racism resulted in the indiscriminate imprisonment and even murder of innocent workers from other parts of Africa falsely accused of being mercenaries. Those suspected of residual loyalty to Gaddafi have often fared little better.

In contrast to Hilsum, Crawford  whose admirable and brave coverage of Libya for Sky News included riding into Tripoli with rebels liberating the city  has written a breathless diary of reporting the uprising. In Colonel Gaddafi's Hat she offers few of the historical insights of Sandstorm and the voices of Libyans don't exactly shine through. But she does give a good account of the drama of those uncertain days when it was far from clear the revolution would be won. She also delves into what it is to be a reporter grappling with the frustration and anger that dogs journalists covering conflicts.

Crawford's frustrations run so deep that when she gets home to her husband and children during a break from Libya, she tries to hunt down the best way to contact the foreign secretary, William Hague, and tell him to look at the Sky News pictures and do something. The west did do something: bomb. Nato's role was controversial, although there's no doubt that it saved the revolution in its early days, and that French and British training and weapons were important in delivering up the final victory. What the Libyans do with that remains to be seen, as both Hilsum and Crawford recognise.