85 Books Like Adrift

I really enjoy stories told from multiple points of view. Everyone has a possible motive, and this kept me feeling uncertain who to trust.

The Guest List made me feel like I was in Ireland, experiencing the surface luxuries of a destination wedding while shivering from the eternal cold and bleak weather. It’s fun to feel like you’re there, like you're making new friends and living through the mayhem as the mystery unfolds.

This addictive page-turner revolves around an extravagant hen party where bride-to-be Jen rents a luxury getaway on a private island.

The fact that the helicopter which brought the guests to the island won't be back for 72 hours ramps up the sense of impending doom and claustrophobia, this further enhanced when the wifi is cut off. I devoured the varied and well-rounded cast of characters, each with their own complex backstories, secrets, and agendas giving them a motive to kill.

When one of the guests disappears, they receive a message telling them that unless someone confesses her terrible secret to the others, their missing friend will be killed. This was such a clever idea and had me itching to know who in the group the message was aimed at.

This is the story of four best friends and their families who head to Southern France for a birthday celebration.

The setting is seemingly idyllic while the atmosphere starts off light and playful, lulling both the readers and characters into a false sense of security when in fact danger looms just around the corner.

The main character is policewoman Kate who uncovers something deeply unsettling almost as soon as she arrives in France. Logan expertly captures her escalating inner turmoil and desperation to discover the truth, while her relationships with others become increasingly strained.

I found his use of interweaving plotlines gripping, focussed on ordinary people in relationships we can all relate to, while keeping me in suspense right up to the exciting finale.

I really enjoyed this clever Young Adult whodunnit mystery centering on three families reuniting for their annual summer holiday in Cornwall.

When one of the teenage daughters goes missing following a game of hide and seek, her doting, yet secretly envious, best friend tries to piece together what happened.

The story is told between present and past events, but also through letters written by the main protagonist to the missing girl, phrased in such a way I wasn’t quite sure how much or little she really knew about what happened to her friend, which elevated the mystery.

The families are brimming with resentments, tensions & jealousies, heightening the intrigue and potential culprits, but what I loved most was the hugely unexpected denouement. A very clever twist I didn’t see coming!

Unusually for a non-native cookery writer - and particularly so for the Catalans - this encyclopedic work by one of the US's most distinguished scholar cooks has become the go-to in restaurant kitchens throughout Spain's least-conformist region.

Publication in the Catalan language of its predecessor, Josep LLadonosa's El Gran Libro de la Cuina Catalana in 1992 (translated into Spanish, but not into English) was only possible after the demise of General Franco ended a fifty-year dictatorship that followed a particularly bloody civil war.

In spite of all efforts by Spain's central government to suppress Catalunia's language and culture, her spirit lived on - not least in a very distinctive culinary habit. It's no surprise that the iconoclastic genius of Ferran Adria surfaced in the land of Guadi and Dali. And no accident that Spain's gastronomic revolution started in Barcelona.  

Laymon provides the perfect mix of psychological horror and serial killer madness in this cult novel that is part murder mystery and part survival horror. In Island, a family boat trip to a remote island goes horribly awry when someone starts offing family members one by one. It will leave you shocked and satisfied with its overwhelming tension and disturbing ending.

I’m fairly certain that in this book, Vonnegut incites an apocalypse on humanity in order to prove that human beings are worth saving—and I’m so here for it. He didn’t hold back on who would live and who would die, on what would happen to humanity. And yet, I was enthralled with the interiority and struggles of each and every character—even those that were doomed.

I particularly love non-linear storytelling because it gives us glimpses into the future, only to make us ask questions about ourselves in the present. Getting to the end only made me want to start back at the beginning so I could linger a bit longer with humanity on the brink.

Lynes writes masterful psychological suspense which always has the reader asking how they would behave in the world she creates.

This superb book opens with a mother whose toddler has gone missing when she looked away for just a moment. I was gripped from the first line.

Tackling personal and community responsibility, it also examines friendship and the love a mother has for her child.

You can’t go wrong with an S E Lynes.

Since I plowed my way through this rollicking 800-page epic, I have eagerly recommended it to others. It ranks as one of a select few long books that never bogged down and left me with a twinge of sadness that it did not just keep going.

When the curtain finally fell (as I knew it would, upon Confederate collapse in 1865), I had been enthralled by dozens of expertly drawn characters and episodes. Some of the ministers, soldiers, and publicists appear once or twice; others provide a narrative spine that charts developments across the entire struggle.

Collectively, this dramatis personae restores the drama to what less gifted story-tellers than Foreman have termed “Anglo-American relations” in the battle for and against the Confederate rebellion.

Like Colville, Nicolson is not very important in himself (a backbench MP for most of the time) but one who matters because he knows so many greater figures and because he writes with such honesty – particularly interesting when his predictions turn out to be wrong. If you get hooked, you can read the earlier edition, which is in three volumes.