…are you reading now? WHATBOOK..?

THE Last Party by Clare Mackintosh. It’s written with such wit and is peopled with superbly drawn characters. Unpredictable, fresh dialogue and a plot that’s keeping me on my toes. I’ve also just finished Rachel Joyce’s latest — Maureen Fry And The Angel Of The North, the third part of the Harold Fry trilogy. It’s exquisite and beautifully crafted.

…would you take to a desert island?

MY NEW Year’s resolution this year was to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I got half way through Taming Of The Shrew which is meant to be his first play and never got any further.

So the complete works of Shakespeare would be a good choice. Otherwise one of the autobiographies I’ve read in recent times that have made me laugh out loud as well as cry: Miriam Margolyes, Tom Jones or Johnny Vegas. Oh, and Graham Norton. Hmm. Who to choose, who to choose…

…first gave you the reading bug?

THAT’S tricky. I loved Enid Blyton’s The Twins At St Clare’s when I was little and Malory Towers. But the first literature I remember reading and being drawn in by was Thomas Hardy’s Mayor Of Casterbridge. You can’t beat a bit of Hardy for powerful descriptive writing and heart-breaking situations/moral dilemmas where Fate steps in and ruins everything.

…left you cold?

WELL, at the risk of alienating half the population, I’ve never been a Tolkien fan. I read The Hobbit in school when I was 12 and it just didn’t do anything for me. It was the same with Lord Of The Rings.

The other hugely successful book that left me cold was Fifty Shades Of Grey. It was so badly written I couldn’t last the course. The dialogue was ridiculous.

Mind you, I’m supposing readers weren’t meant to be too bothered about what people were saying to each other, it was more about what they were doing or which whip they were going to choose that day! n LOVE Untold by Ruth Jones is published by Bantam Press at £20.