Ruth Ware

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

I'm not 100% sure 'Rebecca' qualifies as a thriller, given it's three parts screwed-up love story and two parts ghost-story-without-a-ghost, but the mystery at the heart of the novel is what happened to Maxim's first wife, the eponymous Rebecca, and it's unravelled with the pacing and finesse of the finest psychological thrillers out there.

One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.

I found the success of 'In a Dark, Dark Wood' really distracting when I was writing 'The Woman in Cabin 10,' but in a way, the fact that 'Cabin 10' was doing well felt quite freeing while I was writing 'The Lying Game.'

I really enjoy writing about female friendship. It's an endlessly interesting dynamic for me.

I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.

If I'm writing a furiously angry scene, I have to consciously snap out of it when I shut down the computer, or I find myself growling at my family.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is to write the book that you would want to read, and hope other people agree.

We leap to conclusions and remember those conclusions as fact. We react on our own prejudices but don't always recognize them as such.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

Seeing my book on a billboard in New York was a bucket-list-type thing, but also a deeply surreal moment. I had to keep reminding myself that, oh, yes, I wrote that book.