Looking for a novel that will quicken your heartbeat and jump-start your brain in equal measures? One of these eight novels may just fit the bill. They’re all smart, thought-provoking reads – with a thrilling hook.

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. But then something starts picking off her sheep, one by one. It could be anything – a fox or perhaps that obscure, formidable beast Jake’s been hearing rumours about. She just hopes it’s not a piece of her past. She thought she left that behind her, thousands of miles away.

Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit (translated by Imogen Taylor)

Randolph insists that he’s always had a normal childhood, even though his father kept 30 loaded guns in the house. And now he has an attractive, intelligent wife and two children, enjoys modest success as an architect and has just moved into a beautiful flat in a respectable part of Berlin. Life seems perfect – until his wife meets the man living in the basement below. (This novel is based on the author’s own terrifying experience of being stalked.)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

Jake and his girlfriend are on a drive to visit his parents at their remote farm. The drive seems uneventful but after dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange. And then Jake leaves his girlfriend stranded in a snowstorm at an abandoned high school later that night. What follows is a chilling exploration of psychological frailty and the limitations of reality.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna was a good wife, mostly, and it’s that ‘mostly’ that haunts the pages of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s erotically-charged debut novel. An American ex-pat living a life of comfort and affluence in Zurich with her Swiss banker husband and their three young children – Anna Benz seems to have it all. In reality, she’s adrift and depressed, unable to meaningfully assert her agency. She begins to engage in short-lived but intense sexual affairs, ultimately setting off a chain of events that ends in unspeakable tragedy.

The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay

The Mirror Thief is a masterful puzzle – a genre-hopping novel that combines a layered, rewarding mystery with serious literary ambition. Martin Seay ties together three loosely-connected stories in different iterations of Venice: Venice, Italy in the 1600s; Venice Beach, CA in the 1950s; and The Venetian casino in Las Vegas in 2003.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen Dunlop is an unassuming young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison. Consumed by self-loathing, she tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies. When a charismatic new counselor, Rebecca Saint John, at the prison arrives on the scene, Eileen is unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Cult horror director Stanislas Cordova hasn’t been seen in public since 1971. To his fans, he is an enigma. To journalist Scott McGrath, he is the enemy. And to Ashley, he was a father. ‘Was’ because the young, beautiful Ashley Cordova has just been found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Her suicide appears to be the latest tragedy to hit a severely cursed dynasty but for McGrath – another death connected the legendary director seems more than coincidence. The last time McGrath got close to exposing Cordova, he lost his marriage and his career; this time, he might lose his grip on reality.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker (translated by Sam Taylor)

Marcus Goldman is the hotshot young author of a bestselling debut novel, and he’s in big trouble. The final deadline for book two is almost here and he’s got nothing to show his publisher. But when his old friend and mentor, the novelist Harry Quebert, becomes implicated in the long-ago murder of a teenage girl, Marcus thinks he may have his story at last – but does he? Our reviewer writes that this novel has a twist SO good she almost called in dead to work so she could stay home and finish it.