73 Books Like Survive the Night

I’m a teacher who has mainly taught the eighth grade. When I read short stories and books aloud to my students, I pay attention to when I feel their interest waning and when they’re completely enthralled. Books are so much more action-driven than they used to be and there is often not a lot of description of setting and appearances. I can tell that my students lose interest in scenes that describe a room, for example, in careful detail. They want to hear about what the characters are saying and doing. They also like to feel like they’re being let in on secrets. 

Locked room thrillers are what I like to read and write best. Out of my four published novels, two include locked rooms. Gated takes place in a community with an apocalyptic bunker and Flight 171 takes place on a plane. The characters must face their antagonists head-on because there is no escape. I love that these settings challenge me to dig deep into character and plot inventively. Exposing my characters’ darkest secrets as they face their foes becomes part of the fun. The books I chose for this list all have excellent “locked rooms” and speak to the girl in me who gobbled up Murder on the Orient Express and became instantly obsessed. 

Locked room thrillers are what I like to read and write best. Out of my four published novels, two include locked rooms. Gated takes place in a community with an apocalyptic bunker and Flight 171 takes place on a plane. The characters must face their antagonists head-on because there is no escape. I love that these settings challenge me to dig deep into character and plot inventively. Exposing my characters’ darkest secrets as they face their foes becomes part of the fun. The books I chose for this list all have excellent “locked rooms” and speak to the girl in me who gobbled up Murder on the Orient Express and became instantly obsessed. 

Locked room thrillers are what I like to read and write best. Out of my four published novels, two include locked rooms. Gated takes place in a community with an apocalyptic bunker and Flight 171 takes place on a plane. The characters must face their antagonists head-on because there is no escape. I love that these settings challenge me to dig deep into character and plot inventively. Exposing my characters’ darkest secrets as they face their foes becomes part of the fun. The books I chose for this list all have excellent “locked rooms” and speak to the girl in me who gobbled up Murder on the Orient Express and became instantly obsessed. 

I’m a native New Yorker whose recent move to the UK gives me both unique insight into a city I lived the hell out of for decades and space and time to look back and wonder what it was all about, like with a lover you still adore but are relieved you’re no longer with. I’ve partied in squats and walked red carpets. I can sniff out a fake-take on this city so many people feel they know long before ever visiting it, and that always offends/bores/turns me off. These books got it right, and I’m thrilled to point more people in their direction.

I’ve been sketching the world around me since 2014 after discovering one or two of the books on this list and feeling inspired to do the same. I have travelled and sketched my way through many countries and in 2020, started a blog called Urban Sketching World, sharing tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. This expanded to a YouTube channel called Taria’s Sketchy Adventures, and I am proud to say I have taught hundreds (possibly thousands) of people how to pick up a sketchbook and start recording their own sketchy adventures. I now have my own book published called The Beginners Guide to Urban Sketching.

Graffiti makes me see the city differently. In fact, graffiti makes me see art and society differently, too. Yet, while an incredibly potent visual form, graffiti is still—over fifty years since its first appearance—commonly misunderstood and maligned. Books are for me a key space through which these often cliched critiques can be countered—let alone a key medium for such an ephemeral art. Each of the books on my list reappraises graffiti as a visual and cultural medium alike. They show the complexity of the image as much as the subculture and together position these iconoclastic images as one of the key art movements of the 20th century.

My love of vampire stories can be put down to two men: Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—Dracula and Van Helsing. I can’t remember how old I was, but undoubtedly too young to be allowed to sit up and watch late-night Hammer movies on the BBC. I was into science fiction too, particularly Doctor Who, and it was that, in part, which inspired me to become a scientist, studying physics at Cambridge. It may seem odd that someone so grounded in what is real should so enjoy writing about the impossible. But it’s reassuring to know that what I write can never actually be. Probably.

I’ve written fourteen historical novels now and most of them include real historical characters. I particularly like writing about women I feel have been misjudged or ignored by historians, and trying to reassess them in the modern age. Fiction allows me to imagine what they were thinking and feeling as they lived through dramatic, life-changing experiences, giving more insight than facts alone could do. Sitting at my desk in the morning and pretending to be someone else is a strange way to earn a living but it’s terrific fun! 

I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.