Madonna is the biggest female pop star in the world yet there is no serious biography of her, and no biography at all by a woman. Existing books are either gossipy style manuals or rehashes of press cuttings and they all end in 2001 with Madonna's marriage to Guy Ritchie. Yet her story hardly ends there, as evinced by her two record breaking world tours since then...

Lucy O'Brien's extensive and well-researched biography will look at Madonna the artist, giving detailed analysis of her music, complete with revealing interviews with musicians and producers. It will focus on her cultural impact and the way she uses cinema, photography, visual art, theatre and dance in her work. It will take an in-depth look at how - and, more to the point, why - Madonna has reinvented herself through her twenties, thirties, forties and will no doubt do so again in her fifties. It will also look at the wider context and include interviews with similarly crusading female artists like Tori Amos, Laurie Anderson, Jeanette Winterson and Tracey Emin.

This will be, quite simply, the definitive Madonna biography.