WHAT BOOK would Jess Kidd take to a desert island?

… are you reading now?

I have two books on the go. The first is a proof by the Irish writer Ruth Gilligan called The Butchers (coming out in March). It’s set in Ireland at the time of the BSE crisis in the UK and brings rural life in a changing Ireland and some dark folklore traditions face to face.

So far, so immersive, and the young girl’s perspective, in particular, is brilliantly drawn. I’m certain it will continue to unsettle me with my vegan ways but Gilligan is a writer I admire, so I’ll steel myself.

I’m also reading Amanda Mason’s gripping Gothic debut The Wayward Girls because I love a ghost story. The tale switches between 1976 and the book’s present day. 

The setting — isolated house, Yorkshire Moors — establishes the perfect mood to explore the haunting secrets of two sisters. I’ve not yet finished and am wondering what delicious chills Mason will come up with next.

… first gave you the reading bug?

I was largely taught to read by my eldest sister with the help of her library of Mills & Boon romance novels.

However, the book that gave me the reading bug was Conrad: The Factory-Made Boy by Christine Nöstlinger.

The gorgeously eccentric Mrs Bartolotti accidentally receives a son, named Conrad, in the post. He’s designed to be the perfect child but Mrs Bartolotti proves to be the most imperfect of mothers.

He helps her put her life in order and she teaches him how to play.

An anarchic joy of a book that demonstrates that love conquers all and that adults are generally clueless even if they pretend they are not.

… would you take to a desert island?

Danny The Champion Of The World by Roald Dahl, because I’m assuming I’ll be alone on the island and will have to befriend a volleyball and it would be good to be reminded of the best kind of human relationships.

I’m a great Dahl fan and this tale, which centres on the life of a boy and his father who live in a caravan getting by, is wonderful. 

Widower William fixes cars and engages in clandestine poaching. Danny, a baby when his mother died, finds that his father’s night-time excursions are not without risk or repercussions. 

Looking to shame a rich and selfish local landowner by disappearing his pheasants before a big shoot, William comes up with a cunning plan.

This is a book that sublimely captures how precarious life can be, even for the child of a loving parent. It will be a great tale to read aloud, with all the voices, to my new pal, Wilson the volleyball . . .

… left you cold?

No book has entirely left me cold. I’m an optimistic reader and a very slow one, so that by the time I’ve read a book it’s lived a few months with me and is a tatty old friend.

One that chilled me was Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s anti-Western following the exploits of the brutal Glanton Gang as they commit atrocities along the Mexico-U.S. borderlands in the 1840s.

Without a single likeable character the story is propelled by relentless violence in a landscape that is vast, mean, bleak but rendered in glorious Technicolor. I’ll take this to my desert island to terrify Wilson with if he’s a bad ball.

n Jess Kidd’s latest novel Things In Jars is out in paperback (Canongate, £8.99).