Top 10 books to impress a prospective lover

Mariella Frostrup has enjoyed a four-decade career as one of the UK’s most respected broadcasters and journalists. Her ground-breaking BBC documentary The Truth About Menopause (2018) helped to ignite a national conversation. In 2022, she was named one of Vogue’s 25 most influential women in the UK. She is co-founder and Chair of the campaign group Menopause Mandate, and in 2024 was appointed the UK Government’s Menopause Employment Ambassador.

In 2025, Frostrup became a Trustee of both the V&A and the British Council, following six years on the executive board of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Her books include Menolicious (a menopause-focused cookbook co-authored with Belles Berry), Cracking the Menopause (with Alice Smellie), and three anthologies.

Back in 2000 for the Guardian, Frostrup tagged ten books to impress a prospective lover, including:

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

A columnist and environmental campaigner for the Miami Herald, this is Hiaasen's first novel in what has evolved into a series of blackly comic and utterly readable satires set in his native Florida. Those who saw the dreadful screen adaptation of his novel Striptease shouldn't be put off the author himself. Essential holiday/aeroplane reading.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Tourist Season is among Joy Fielding's five essential thrillers perfect for the aspiring writer.

--Marshal Zeringue