Five titles that feature the uncanny suspense of a third character's arrival

Nick Newman is the adult pen-name of Nicholas Bowling, author of several children’s novels including Witchborn and In the Shadow of Heroes, which was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award. He works as a bookseller at Daunt Books in London.

His new novel is The Garden.

At CrimeReads Newman tagged five books by "authors who have made masterpieces of tension through a triangulating a single relationship." One title on the list:

Embers, Sandor Marai

It’s a shame more people don’t know about this Hungarian novel – it is so exquisitely melancholy and offers a masterclass in the building of tension. In a gloomy castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an elderly man awaits the arrival of a friend whom he has not seen for over 40 years. He invites him in. They have dinner. They talk. And that is the plot in its entirety. But over the course of that one night, their lives are excavated, the visitor’s character forensically examined, and they dig and dig until they reach the bedrock of their relationship: the thing or the person that caused their estrangement in the first place. The third character in this novel never actually appears, but drifts like a ghost through the recollections of these two old men – only when she is fully fleshed does the novel reach its shattering conclusion.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue