Nowhere to run: Emma Stonex on the power of claustrophobia in thrillers and the books that do it best

The ultimate literal locked-room mystery, this is the story of five-year-old Jack and his beloved Ma, who are imprisoned together in a narrow, locked room in an unknown house. And yet it is so much more than a what-happens-next thriller. It’s a puzzle, a heartbreaker, a love letter from a parent to a child, and a terrifying yet somehow beautiful depiction of isolation, entrapment, innocence and the price of freedom. I read it years ago, in one sitting, and have never forgotten it.

A murder mystery turned inside-out and back-to-front, Fair Play is unlike anything I’ve read. To celebrate her brother Benjamin’s birthday, Abigail hires a grand house in the country and throws a party for their friends. In the morning, everyone wakes up to a new day – except Benjamin. When a famous detective arrives, determined to solve the crime, the house becomes a lock-up and the suspects are trapped. Benjamin’s killer is somewhere in the mansion – aren’t they? Hegarty subverts genre at every twist in this fiendishly gripping plot, where nothing is quite as it seems.

Leila is isolated, spending more of her life online than she does in the real world, disillusioned by a job she doesn’t like and struggling to make ends meet. So when the mysterious Adrian approaches her with a proposition – to assume the virtual identity of a troubled woman she’s never met – she accepts. So begins a disturbing, psychologically complex thriller about loneliness, alienation and obsession, and about what it means to be ensnared in someone else’s life.

A strange, haunting and sensuous read, this is the story of Miri and Leah, reunited after Leah returns from catastrophe at sea. But something has changed in Leah: she’s no longer the woman Miri married. Cleverly combining literal confinement in Leah’s isolation on a drowned deep-sea submarine, and figurative suffocation in a relationship that is struggling to survive, Armfield builds exquisite tension via a dual narrative awash with lyricism and body horror. It’s a deeply affecting novel of intense psychological insight, and a delicately drawn portrait of grief and loss. 

Deeply creepy, this slender, powerful tale, originally published in 1892, was way ahead of its time in its essential feminist impulse and portrayal of mental health. Our unnamed narrator is locked in an attic bedroom, separated from her newborn baby and treated as a mad woman. The room’s garish yellow wallpaper haunts her dreaming mind, then her waking mind, closing in on her as she drops into depression and a cycle of fear and paranoia. She charts in a secret diary the effects of quarantine on an unravelling psyche: the wallpaper’s spreading, sinuous patterns reach out of the pages and into our imagination, pulling us into an urgent and unforgettable nightmare.

‘The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other . . .’

In January 1989, Birdie learns that Jimmy Maguire, the man who killed her sister, has been released, and leaves immediately for London with a plan and a gun. But is there another side to the story? Emma Stonex's latest literary thriller is a gripping cat-and-mouse chase that delves into the psychological depths of grief and retribution, blurring lines between victim and perpetrator.

Cornwall, 1972. Three keepers vanish from a remote lighthouse, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. The Principal Keeper’s weather log describes a mighty storm, but the skies have been clear all week. Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on, when they are given the chance to tell their side of the story. Inspired by true events, this enthralling and suspenseful mystery is a beautifully written exploration of love and grief, perception and reality.