If you like watching professional cycling then, to a certain extent, you like watching other people suffer. The British (sorry, proudly Scottish) rider David Millar has always been a gratifying subject in this regard. While some road racers make a point of never letting their mask slip, Millar shows the onlooker exactly how much it hurts  and, if you miss the hints, he tells you explicitly in eloquent, often volatile post-stage interviews. For the past decade or so, the 34-year-old has specialised in two elements of the sport: one, time trials, the so-called "races of truth", which break up major races like the Tour de France and are the most concentrated pain you can inflict on yourself on a bike; and two, suicidal solo breakaways, which are not far behind. Fans have been waiting for his autobiography for a long time.

Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar (Orion £18.99) does not disappoint. Millar has not always been celebrated for his candour and honesty. In 2004, police raided a restaurant where he was dining with British Cycling head David Brailsford in Biarritz and he was arrested as a drugs cheat. It was one of the saddest falls from grace in a particularly bleak era for cycling, but what happened next has defined Millar's legacy and made him one of the most influential individuals in cleaning up the sport.

From a peripatetic upbringing in Scotland, Aylesbury and Hong Kong, Millar has always been an idiosyncratic cyclist and something of a loner too. He had a talent for racing and won the prologue of his first Tour de France in 2000  long before he used performance-enhancers. In fact, he was idealistic about not doping and although he could see signs of its use  the delivery of ice bags day and night to the rooms of team-mates to keep the EPO cool was a clue  he never thought he would be tempted. But in Racing Through the Dark, Millar depicts how his resolve slowly weakened: starting with "legal" récup injections of vitamins and iron, through his increasing dependence on sleeping pills before finally committing to "prepare properly", as the euphemism had it.

Where Millar's narrative differs from so many riders, however, is what happened when he was busted. Almost immediately, he admitted everything; then, and this really is unprecedented, he decided to use his experience as a cautionary tale. He talked openly to the press about the prevalence of doping, he became a mentor to young riders and he even harangued Lance Armstrong at a drinks party for not being hard enough on convicted dopers. After serving a two-year suspension from racing, he came back riding on "bread and water" and scored some of the greatest successes of his career. His tale  bizarrely  has become just about the most inspiring in all of cycling, perhaps any sport.

If you want to find out how cyclists dope, it's here; if you want to discover why they do it, there has never been a more vivid account. But the defining achievement of Racing Through the Dark is that it makes you believe in cycling again and, through his career, Millar shows that maybe all that suffering is worth something after all.

Millar is a recurring character in another new book, Ned Boulting's How I Won the Yellow Jumper (Yellow Jersey £12.99): in fact he even inspired its tongue-in-cheek title. Boulting, a football reporter for ITV, was deployed on roving duties for the 2003 Tour de France. He could probably have picked out Lance Armstrong but knew precious little else, so when Millar narrowly missed out on winning the prologue of the race, Boulting announced breathlessly to a live audience that he was "kissing goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper". Of course, he meant "jersey", a mistake he has never lived down.

Boulting may be little known to the vast majority of television viewers, but among cycling fans he is accorded near-iconic status for his work on ITV4's untouchable coverage of Le Tour. This is the story of eight years on a job that might involve being stranded halfway up a mountain overnight with only crazy Basques for company, hiding out on hotel fire escapes waiting to catch disgraced riders and sporadically being sworn at by Mark Cavendish. A whole chapter is dedicated to toilets; there is a substantial section on laundry. But what Boulting's book lacks in obvious narrative structure it makes up for in funny anecdotes and strange, revealing insights, like Team Sky giving their riders entirely blue packs of M&Ms to match their new kit.

Most of the cyclists in Timm Kölln's wonderful book of portraits, The Peloton (Rouleur £50), look more like coal miners at the end of a shift than professional sportsmen. For six years, Kölln has hung around major races with a white backdrop and photographed riders just before they climb on their bikes or immediately after they clock off, caked in muck and grime after a long day in Flanders or weather-beaten and broken by the Alps. The 96 stark black-and-white images collected here are wonderfully expressive and are supplemented by brief interviews that never outstay their welcome.

The subjects include all of the big names of the last decade, minus Armstrong, but perhaps the most interesting are the lesser-known domestiques, the much-abused support riders finally given equal billing with the superstars of the sport. "You get used to not winning," admits Charlie Wegelius, a British rider who has been a professional since 2000 and never won a race. "Otherwise it's like waiting for Christmas every day, and it never comes."

There is long-term suffering at the heart of another cycling book, One Man and His Bike (Ebury £11.99), written by my colleague Mike Carter. This time, however, it appears to be working at the Observer that is the cause of the existential anguish, and cycling that provides the outlet, as the unstoppable Carter undertakes a 5,000-mile solo journey round the coast of Britain. It is a formidable endeavour  the distance from London to Calcutta  but anyone familiar with his previous odyssey, where he battled a midlife crisis by taking off across Europe on a motorbike, will know what a satisfying travel companion he is, a magnet for surreal happenings and unexpected acts of hospitality. As with Millar, the message is clear: redemption and a new life is just a (very long) bike ride away.

Within the space of 24 hours last month, professional bike racers forced the cancellation of a stage of the Tour of California because of cold weather and persuaded the organisers of the Giro d'Italia to bypass a particularly dangerous descent. A reader of Richard Moore's Slaying the Badger (Yellow Jersey, £12.99), an account of the ferocious battle between Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond for supremacy in the 1986 Tour de France, might come across the tale of Hinault  the Badger of the title  suffering severe frostbite while riding to victory through snow and ice early in his career and conclude that today's riders have gone soft.

If that reader were then to encounter David Millar's harrowing description of his mental and physical ordeal on an Alpine stage of the 2010 Tour de France, which forms the climax of Racing Through the Dark, a different impression might be entertained. Millar's suffering that day is the sort of thing that forms an unbreakable link between cycling's rich history and its present.

By the time we reach his Calvary on the Col de la Madeleine, we have travelled with Millar from his origins as a party-loving expat brat in Hong Kong to his current status as one of the world's leading riders, via the life-changing consequences of the single most dramatic incident of his career: the night in 2001 when two French policemen led him out of a restaurant in Biarritz, his adopted home, and, with the aid of two empty syringes found in his apartment, induced him to confess to having used illegal performance-enhancing drugs in order to achieve some of his greatest triumphs.

Some, but not all. When he was 23 years old and still drug-free, Millar won an important stage of the Tour de France. Drugs alone did not make him a top rider. Gradually, however, this intelligent, articulate, emotionally volatile, intellectually inquisitive young man, who would have gone to art college had he not become a professional racer, allowed himself to be sucked into the culture of doping.

Like many others, he had grown frustrated by being part of a peloton à deux vitesses, in which the doped riders almost invariably beat their clean rivals with demoralising ease. There was a natural progression from regular "recovery" injections of vitamins through the use of cortisone to the quasi-scientific administering of EPO, a hormone boosting the production of red blood cells. This changed the doping game in the 1990s, when riders moved beyond crude stimulants such as the notorious "pot Belge", a concoction of amphetamine and heroin, to substances that increased their capacity for physical endurance to inhuman levels.

Millar's description of his fall is laceratingly honest, detailing every twist in the argument by which he convinced himself to take a step he had previously considered unthinkable. Most of the men who helped him to destroy himself, either by supplying substances, sharing their expertise or turning a blind eye, are named, but that is not really the point: anyone seeking to understand the motivation of a drug cheat, or wondering why such a man should be allowed back into his sport after serving his two-year suspension, will find their curiosity satisfied here.

Since returning to competition in 2006, Millar has taken every opportunity to campaign against doping, speaking eloquently from a position of considerable authority. He lost the thread of his career and is now determined to help save his sport by preventing others from falling into the same trap. Cyclists still dope, but a smaller proportion than 10 years ago and with a greater chance of getting caught.

This is an urgent tale, told in an authentic voice. His portraits of contemporaries such as Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish are vividly intimate and shrewdly observed. The recollection of his meeting with Lance Armstrong at the end of the 2007 tour, when he accused the man who had been among his early supporters of abusing the sport, is chilling. And the description of that agonising mountain stage last summer, during which he scoured the depths of his soul while falling helplessly behind the rest of the field, deserves to stand among the great first-person accounts of sporting experience.

Like cricket, boxing, golf and football before it, cycling is currently experiencing something of a literary golden age, and Racing Through the Dark and Slaying the Badger take their place alongside recent volumes by Matt Rendell, William Fotheringham, Jean Bobet, Graeme Fife, Paul Fournel, Bella Bathurst and others. If Millar's tale is largely about one man's battle against himself, Moore's book recounts the saga of the classic duel between Hinault, a pugnacious Breton who had already won the tour five times, and the gifted but somewhat less worldly LeMond, a younger man bidding to become the first American to take home the yellow jersey.

This was a rivalry to match those of Ali and Frazier, Borg and McEnroe or Senna and Prost, made all the more intriguing by the fact that the two men were members of the same team. A year earlier, LeMond had sacrificed his own chances in order to help le Blaireau to achieve his record-equalling fifth win, and had been promised that the favour would be reciprocated at the next opportunity. That was not the way things turned out in the course of a struggle so bitter that the American came to feel that he was fighting the entire French nation.

Drawing on interviews with the protagonists and many of their supporting cast, the author recreates the mounting tension between the cunning Hinault and the more cautious LeMond, who scandalises the old-school European riders by reading a book at dinner and playing golf on the tour's rest days. A former rider who has written for this newspaper, Moore entertainingly unravels the complexities of the relationships within the peloton during a three-week stage race, the sort of battle in which alliances can shift from one mountain peak to another and your enemy's enemy can suddenly become your most valued friend.