She would need a Spanish/English dictionary to go with it, but what book would

What book… 

Louise Minchin’s new book Isolation Island is available now from the Mail Bookshop

…are you reading now?

I have just started Asia Mackay’s A Serial Killer’s Guide To Marriage, and I am absolutely loving it. I read 60 pages in my first sitting. 

I am a huge fan of a flawed main character, and the two protagonists here are very deeply flawed. Hazel and Fox are married with a child. He has an office job, and she is an artist who does most of the childcare. 

To their neighbours they appear to be living a conventional middle-class life. But all is not what it seems: before their baby was born, they were serial killers. 

Think of a vigilante style Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Mr and Mrs Smith but set in British suburbia.

It is brilliantly written, incredibly funny and busts dozens of cliches. It is clear from the start that Hazel longs to get back to what she does best, righting wrongs through murder and I can’t wait to see how their carefully constructed facade is going to unravel.

…would you take to a desert island?

I would take a copy of 100 Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spanish and (if I am allowed) a Spanish/English dictionary to help me read it.

When I was studying for my Spanish degree at St Andrews, it was the first book I read entirely in the language it was written in. It took me several months and, by the time I finished it, my linguistic skills had improved so much that I would sometimes dream in Spanish. 

I would like to read the book again on the desert island, as it would while away the days until I was rescued.

Pages of adventure: Minchin caught the reading bug from Swallows and Amazons

…first gave you the reading bug?

I devoured Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. It gave me two things, a love of reading and a sense of adventure.

It was the first time I was able to escape into a world that wasn’t my own and I felt like I was on board those tiny sailing boats in the Lake District having wild adventures.

…left you cold?

I was not a huge fan of David Copperfield. I read it at school and never finished it so, before I started Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s reimagining of the Dickens classic, I was worried I wouldn’t like it. 

I didn’t need to be, I was blown away by her beautifully told story of a boy who is born in a trailer park in the Appalachian Mountains to a drug addict mother. I was devastated when I finished the book and delighted that it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023 when I was Chair of the Judging Panel.

Isolation Island by Louise Minchin (Headline, £20) is out now.