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ISLANDS

I SPENT hours last week trying to calculate the best way to stretch some Air Miles from London to Aberdeen, to be with my mother on her birthday. All the pictures on the website were of, frankly, more exotic destinations: Greek villages overlooking the deep blue of the Aegean, the aqua of the Caribbean lapping a palm-fringed beach, beautiful people partying in Ibiza.

I am an island obsessive. I love one in the sun, but also a wind-blown craggy northern one. There is something about crossing water to get to land — ideally aboard a ferry — that instils a spirit of adventure.

From Homer and Shakespeare to Ann Cleeves’s Shetland, the clearly defined geographies and tightly drawn communities of islands have inspired writers. Anyone who makes land is either an incomer, tourist or a returnee. Instantly, there is potential for conflict.

Kate Rhodes has a terrific detective series set on the Scilly Isles, somewhere I long to visit. The first, Hell Bay, introduces DI Ben Kitto, a native of Bryher who has come home after a decade with the Metropolitan police’s murder squad to rest and recuperate. Then the body of a teenage girl is discovered.

I could just write about books set on British islands, like To The Lighthouse (Skye), Whisky Galore (Hebridean tomfoolery) or Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (Devon). But surely we are all craving foreign adventures.

Victoria Hislop has recently published a children’s story, Maria’s Island, based on her saga The Island, exploring Spinalonga, a former island leper colony off Crete.

If it is sexual misadventure you crave then Helen Walsh’s erotically charged The Lemon Grove might fit the bill.

It is set in Deia, the picturesque seaside village on the rugged North-West coast of Mallorca that was home to writer Robert Graves. On a family summer holiday, Jenn finds herself dangerously, recklessly — and wholly inappropriately — attracted to her teenage stepdaughter’s boyfriend.

Even if you don’t make it to the Med, these are worth diving into.