Five Survive

Five Survive is a thriller by the British writer Holly Jackson, published in November 2022 and her first standalone novel after the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series.

Almost all of the book takes place inside the motorhome, which is the point: six young people, a nearly flat tyre, no phone signal and an unseen opponent who has cut them off deliberately, so the story has to be resolved by conversation, argument and the slow exposure of what each of them has been hiding. Red narrates, and her grief for her mother and her position in the group are established early enough that the reader can watch her assumptions fail one at a time. Jackson writes the mechanics of a siege with care, including the fuel, the water, the temperature and the exact amount of daylight, and she uses the group's history to decide who behaves well. The novel reached the top of the New York Times young adult hardcover bestseller list, and it was written for the same readership as her earlier series while being, unlike those books, complete in one volume.