If you yearn for dark, tense and moody stories in the colder months, we recommend some of the most outstanding recent literary thrillers. Our picks span disaster novels, psychological tales, near-future dystopias, gothic contemporary fiction, historical thrillers and more.

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

Glasgow, 2025. Dr Amanda Maclean is called to treat a young man with a mild fever. Within three hours he dies. The mysterious illness sweeps through the hospital with deadly speed. The victims are all men. Dr Maclean raises the alarm, but the sickness spreads to every corner of the globe. Threatening families. Governments. Countries. Can they find a cure before it’s too late? Will this be the story of the end of the world - or its salvation?

Sweeney-Baird’s debut pandemic thriller is compelling, confronting and devastating. The End of Men taps into the perspectives of a wide variety of surviving women - doctors, historians, intelligence analysts - to explore what our world might look like without men.

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz

When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city’s latest Jane Doe, an unidentified murder victim. Ruby Jones is also trying to start over; she travelled halfway around the world only to find herself lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice’s body by the Hudson River.

Alice is sure that Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life - and death. And Ruby - struggling to forget what she saw that morning - finds herself unable to let Alice go. Not until she is given the ending she deserves. This literary crime novel is a moving meditation on the loss of women to male violence, as well as the resolve it takes to bring about justice.

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (available 8 June 2021)

Troubled group therapist Mariana Andros is grieving the loss of her husband, when her niece Zoe calls her from Cambridge University, distraught. In Cambridge – a place heavy with memories of Mariana’s late husband – she finds Zoe’s best friend dead, and the most obvious culprit is Professor Edward Fosca. But he has an alibi in a secret society of beautiful young women called The Maidens, who worship him. Mariana is convinced they would lie for him, but would they die for him too? Or is obsessive Mariana, tangled in memories and mysteries, just falling apart?

This cerebral psychological thriller by the author of the bestselling The Silent Patient is rich with gothic atmosphere and literary allusions.

Ash Mountain by Helen FitzGerald

Fran thought she’d never return to sleepy Ash Mountain but her dad has become ill, her relationship is over, and she hates her dead-end city job. In a blistering summer, childhood memories prick at Fran’s fragile self-esteem as old friendships and rivalries are renewed and new ones forged. But the tumult of her home life is the least of her worries, because a bushfire is roaring towards Ash Mountain and the town’s long-held secrets will soon be exposed in the carnage.

Ash Mountain is a uniquely Australian domestic noir - warm, blackly funny and a powder keg of accumulated tension. Vividly portraying small-town life, and a woman and a land in crisis, this is a disaster thriller you will never forget.

Tall Bones by Anna Bailey

When seventeen-year-old Emma leaves her best friend Abi at a party in the woods, she has no idea that she will never see her friend again. Abi’s disappearance cracks open the façade of the small town of Whistling Ridge, exposing long-held grudges and resentment. Even within Abi’s family, there are questions to be asked - of Noah, the older brother whom Abi betrayed, of Jude, the shining younger sibling who hides his battle scars, of Dolly, her mother and Samuel, her father - both in thrall to the fire and brimstone preacher who holds the entire town in his grasp. Then there is Rat, the outsider, whose presence in the town both unsettles and excites those around him.

Tall Bones is an elegantly-written debut that unravels the misogyny, homophobia, trauma and secrets of a small town, creating an atmosphere that is tense, claustrophobic and haunting.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Amanda, Clay and their two teenaged children head to an upmarket rental on Long Island, expecting a quiet holiday. But when the home owners Ruth and G. H. knock on the door late at night in a panic, the spell is broken. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and they have come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa?

Leave the World Behind is a strange, original, and thrilling novel keenly attuned to contemporary complexities of parenthood, race and class.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

Cornwall, 1972. Three lighthouse keepers vanish from a remote rock, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. Twenty years later, a young writer comes to interview the women the men left behind. Helen, Jenny and Michelle should have been united by the tragedy, but instead it drove them apart. Now, they have a chance to tell their side of the story. But only in confronting their darkest fears can the truth begin to surface …

Inspired by real historical events, Emma Stonex’s debut novel is an intoxicating, suspenseful and deeply moving mystery, with tinges of horror and the supernatural.