John Fowles is probably better known for the narrative experiments and mind-bending twists of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but The Collector is a quieter book of devastating power. Beautiful Miranda is kidnapped by ‘Fred’ and made to live in his specially adapted basement so he can admire her and keep her all to himself. A rapport gradually builds as she tries to win over her captor, desperately fighting to stay alive. We alternate between Miranda’s memories and despair and the chilling mind of The Collector.

You should read it because novels where ‘the killer narrates’ are ten a penny, but this is how to do it so it’s truly terrifying and moving, not just a cardboard cut-out thinking in crazed italics. Both are rounded, fully realised characters caught in an increasingly impossible situation. The  book was written before Room or the real-life horrors of the Fritzl case, but continues to be as relevant and shocking as ever.

Last year’s  break-out hit is worth reading just to see if the hype is justified – and it’s soon to be a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Nick and Amy are a golden New York couple when the recession hits and they have to move back to Nick’s small home town, where he takes a teaching job. But then Amy disappears. Where is she? At first it’s told in Nick’s first-person point of view, and it’s clear there are things he isn’t telling us. Then we move into extracts from Amy’s diary, which seem to reveal a different type of truth.

You should read it for the expert use of viewpoint to create suspense and twists – in a way the book is made by its viewpoint choices. Read it too for a chilling portrayal of a toxic marriage, and an insight into how the recession has shattered individual lives.

Considered by many to be the first detective novel in English, Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece still has the power to grip and surprise more than a century on. Heiress Rachel Verinder is given The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond, for her eighteenth birthday. That night it is stolen from her bedroom, and the race is on to find the thief. The book is divided up between different narrators, each with their own perspectives on what happened. It’s got the lot – red herrings, twists and turns, sinister uncles, locked rooms, country houses, and a dastardly villain.

You should read it because: it works not only as a gripping and entertaining mystery (and without any gruesome serial killers) but also for its subtle manipulations of the reader, forcing us to examine our own prejudices and judgements.

Daphne du Maurier came up with some of the enduring stories of our times – not just the creepy Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel, but also the short story that inspired Hitchcock’s The Birds. But Rebecca is surely her masterpiece, and helped invent the modern psychological thriller. The poor narrator, who doesn’t even get a first name throughout, is naïve and impoverished, rushing into marriage with brooding, rich Max de Winter, recently widowed. He proposes on top of a cliff by calling her a ‘little fool’ and saying how much he really hated his dead wife, Rebecca. Nice guy!

Returning to his Cornish mansion, Manderley, the heroine is haunted by traces of the beautiful lively Rebecca. But what really happened to her? When the boat she supposedly drowned in is dredged up, and her body is found with a bullet in it, Max and Unnamed Heroine (really, she could have at least merited a name) are caught in a trap from beyond the grave. You should read it because it uses setting brilliantly, as well as a naïve narrator whose innocence and love for her husband mean she can’t see the truth the reader does. It also has a wonderfully unsettling downbeat ending.