Books like Adrift — picked by fans

I lived vicariously through Nancy Drew when I was young. I was naturally observant and curious, and my mom was known to tail a car through our neighborhood if she thought the driver looked suspicious. So, it’s not surprising that I developed a love for all things thrilling. While working in the oil and gas industry for fifteen years, I spent some time focused on a foreign deal that served as inspiration for my first novel. I worked with people seeking power; negotiations bordered on nefarious; the workplace became toxic. If you ever ponder the moral implications behind the pursuit of power, you’ll enjoy the books on this list!

I love writing about the dark side of human nature, and the devastating secrets and resentments that can simmer beneath the surface between friends before reaching boiling point in the most dramatic and sinister way.  It’s a theme pivotal to my latest thriller, which sees friends reuniting in a beautiful yet isolated location for the seemingly perfect celebration, but where things go horribly wrong. I enjoy exploring this topic through multiple characters, all with their own dubious backstories that stir suspicion in readers’ minds and keeps them guessing, while the settings I use play a key role in enhancing that sense of unease and tension conducive to the classic whodunnit.

I love writing about the dark side of human nature, and the devastating secrets and resentments that can simmer beneath the surface between friends before reaching boiling point in the most dramatic and sinister way.  It’s a theme pivotal to my latest thriller, which sees friends reuniting in a beautiful yet isolated location for the seemingly perfect celebration, but where things go horribly wrong. I enjoy exploring this topic through multiple characters, all with their own dubious backstories that stir suspicion in readers’ minds and keeps them guessing, while the settings I use play a key role in enhancing that sense of unease and tension conducive to the classic whodunnit.

I love writing about the dark side of human nature, and the devastating secrets and resentments that can simmer beneath the surface between friends before reaching boiling point in the most dramatic and sinister way.  It’s a theme pivotal to my latest thriller, which sees friends reuniting in a beautiful yet isolated location for the seemingly perfect celebration, but where things go horribly wrong. I enjoy exploring this topic through multiple characters, all with their own dubious backstories that stir suspicion in readers’ minds and keeps them guessing, while the settings I use play a key role in enhancing that sense of unease and tension conducive to the classic whodunnit.

I’m a home cook, not a restaurant chef. I add a pinch of this and splash of that. As a chronicler of other people's culinary habits, I need to understand why we cook the way we do. At its simplest and most basic, what goes into the ancestral cooking-pot depends on who we are, where we live, and where we come from. Which is why whenever we want to remind ourselves who we are, we look for traditional recipes in culinary bibles produced at moments of change. I was born at a moment of change myself, in bombed-out London in 1941, at the height of the Blitz.  

I’ve always been a fan of horror because a good scare makes the adrenaline flow. Personally, I don’t think ghosts and demons are real, and they don’t scare me. But humans…humans can be downright evil. This is why I gravitate toward serial killer and slasher fiction when I’m looking for a scare. Sometimes I just want to test my endurance for the dark side of human nature. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to write a really depraved book without taking the time to make the reader care about the characters, which is why these novels are my favorite works of darkness. These are great, disturbing books with genuine pathos.

I have a congenital heart disease in which I go into spontaneous cardiac arrest, and I am now 1% bionic (I have an ICD—defibrillator and pacemaker—implanted). Ever since waking up from that surgery, I’ve changed my perspective on what it means to live in the Venn Diagram overlap of “human” and “machine.” My heart—an organ at the heart of so many metaphors about love and emotion—is not like everyone else’s. It is connected to a battery to keep me alive. I write about what it means to be human to better understand myself.

I was drawn to writing family drama because complex family dynamics are endlessly fascinating to me. I’m an adopted person whose parents went on to divorce and remarry. I have two teenagers of my own and I’ve found that there are a multitude of choices we have to make as parents, and sometimes dilemmas don’t have a clear answer. If we get it wrong, the effects on the people we love can be devastating. Love within families can be tricky. The gap between what we want and what we need can be vast. There’s so much to explore in family dramas!

Like most authors, I love reading stories as well as writing them. Being of a certain age, I’ve read plenty. For me, the best tales are those where women overcome deadly odds to create their own happy ending. Those are the books I aim to write too. My characters are much braver than me! While they grapple with challenges, I’m simply tied to a keyboard. Sometimes I take my laptop to a coffee shop (mine’s a flat white, please). I live in Bristol, in the English West Country, and have spent time in Birmingham and London. They all feature in my books and give them a strong sense of place.

I thought I was going to be a farmer, but some serious practical experience after I finished school put paid to that idea. I then focused my attention on conservation, before turning to travel writing. All of which led, eventually, to a growing interest in development issues and how people can make a living from the land. The result is over a dozen books, some of which are narrative-driven travelogues – many based on my experiences in Africa and elsewhere; and some of which focus on the nitty-gritty of agriculture, agroforestry, and related issues. My most recent book, Land of Plenty, provided a state of the nation account of British farming during the tumultuous year (for farmers, at least) when the UK voted to leave the EU.