Imp of the Perverse by Barney Hoskyns (1988)NME journalist Hoskyns took his title from an Edgar Allan Poe story. Looking at the first decade of the diminutive man from Minneapolis's career, the book grew out of Hoskyn's travels with Prince on the road for the 1999 tour but as the author recently recalled in The Observer "the best I got from him on the tour was a blank stare and a limp handshake".It wasn't until the actual year 1999 that Hoskyns finally got a 45-minute interview with the pop star, that left him leaving Prince's Mayfair hotel suite "feeling rather like a mouse that hadn't quite been finished off by a particularly fiendish cat".Prince's Sign o' the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 2004Narrowing in on the 1987 double album, Matos shows how it became one of the seminal albums of the 1980s. He looks not just at the distinctive musical elements that made the record so unique but also examines the social conditions that produced it and why it continues to be a record that if you are "lucky enough to [have it] hit you at the right time can change your way of looking at the world".Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks by Ronin Ro (2012)The famously nonconformist performer remained an elusive figure for biographers and interviewers throughout his career. While there were plenty of juicy gossip-fuelled stories - like the time he played ping pong with rival Michael Jackson, hit him in the crotch with a shot and declared "Did you see that? He played like Helen Keller" - Ronin Ro's book focused perhaps too intensely on the business side of Prince's career. Good on sales figures but not so good on its central figure.Prince by Matt Thorne (2012)Demonstrating yet again the elusiveness of Prince, Thorne's biography tries hard to shed light on the musician's early life - his upbringing by his jazz man father, his brash self confidence from an early age and his creative drive. Even when Thorne manages to track down many of the fellow travellers and collaborators who worked with Prince, it's as difficult to get anything out of them as from the man himself. As the reviewer for The Guardian described it at the time the book ultimately allows "you to understand Prince as a cold and calculating operator but you never feel close to the beating heart of a human being".I Would Die 4 You: Why Prince Became an Icon by Touré' (2013)Based on lectures delivered by the author at Harvard, this is less a biographical work than a consideration of the cultural significance and place of Prince within the universe of modern American popular culture.Though uneven and not always convincing in its arguments there are some intriguing ideas and it is written with considerable panache.Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain by Alan Light (2014)Another album-specific book, released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of what many consider to be the iconic recording of Prince's career. Light, a former senior editor for Rolling Stone, interviews many of the people who worked on the album and how it placed its creator firmly on the road to superstardom...