Vincent Yu is the author of Seek Immediate Shelter , out today from Flatiron Books. Below, he discusses three books that influenced his writing.

My debut novel, Seek Immediate Shelter , follows a group of vastly different characters, all living in the same town, who simultaneously receive a ballistic missile alert. Their reactions range from disbelief, to panic, to relief, to even hope. When a follow-up announcement is released, 18 minutes later, declaring the alert to be a false alarm, these same people must come to terms with how they behaved and reconcile their own identities accordingly.

I’ve always been fascinated by fiction as a pressure cooker for character development.…