If your idea of summer fun is picking a sunspot and diving into some seriously dark fiction, check out this selection of debuts, award-winners and fan favourites. Chosen for their ability to thrill and chill, these novels will send a shiver along your spine on even the brightest of days.

Lullaby by Leïla Slimani

Opening with a brutally dispassionate description of a dead infant, Lullaby sings an unsettling song until the final note. When Myriam and Paul hire an au pair to look after their two young children, Louise seems to solve all of their problems in one fell swoop. But the more intricately bound she becomes to the family, the clearer it is that there's something sinister beneath her honeyed words.
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The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

The Water Cure lures readers onto an abandoned island to join three sisters who've grown up under the cruel and controlling eye of their father, King. The girls have been protected from other men their whole lives and now, King is gone and three strange men have washed up on the beach. A dystopian debut with hypnotic prose and a cold, unforgiving sea.
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The Confession by Jo Spain

JP Carney is quick to confess to violently attacking disgraced banker Harry McNamara in front of his terrified wife. The question of why he did it is the real mystery at the heart of this psychological thriller. With themes of revenge and addiction, The Confession explores the Irish class divide in an explosive, fast paced search for motive.
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Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin

Rice Moore takes on a job protecting bears in a remote forest preserve in Virginian Appalachia to hide from the Mexican drug cartels he betrayed back in Arizona. The work is hard, the lifestyle entirely solitary, and poachers leave gruesome bear carcasses for him to find. This slow, compelling thriller takes the reader deep into the darkest corners of the forest.
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The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Mermaids are not the beautiful, beguiling temptresses of the sea that so many of the characters in this compelling novel want to believe. Our hero is near devastated by the news that one of his captains sold his ship for what appears to be a mermaid, but the creature turns Mr Hancock's life on its head in ways he could never have foreseen.
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