Top ten 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:

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

A beautiful tragicomic tale of two dysfunctional families sharing a dilapidated house in a Melbourne suburb. Winton writes with a highly individual voice and the story is laced with love and hope and all the things that make life worth living.

Read about another title on the list.

Cloudstreet is among Maureen Lindley's nine immortal sibling duels in fiction, Rose Byrne’s ten favorite books, five books that changed Evie Wyld, and Mariella Frostrup's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue