I did some hard time in Alcatraz – the walking tour, then the gift shop. Three hours, maybe even three and a half, but that was long enough. A burly ex-guard led my tour party round his former workplace. He’d written a memoir, which he kept mentioning as he took us through the bleak horrors. Gleefully, he led us into the concrete recreation yard, the library, the kitchen. At the climax came the solitary confinement cell – “the Hole”. It was basically a coffin with a slightly higher ceiling. “For five extra bucks,” he said, “you can stay inside, individually, and I’ll slam the door on you.” I didn’t take up the offer. A long queue of others did. I listened to the iron door go slam, slam, slam.

Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t shell out for the experience. Like many people, I am obsessed with tales of great escapes. Tension/release is how most stories work. But the rawest, most extreme form is confinement/escape. And the more extreme the confinement, the more exhilarating the escape. Of course, there are lots of different ways a person can be in prison, and you don’t always have to get outside your particular prison to get away from it.

I was quite a few years into writing my novel Patience before I realised it was – among other things – a kind of prison-break story. The prison is a Catholic children’s home in 1979, and the prisoner is a boy called Elliott who can move only one finger, but the basic obsessive situation of confinement/escape is the same. Elliott yearns to be free.

Here are 10 of my favourite great escapes, because sometimes Steve McQueen’s motorcycle does make it over the barbed wire fence.

1. Persuasion by Jane Austen

Anne Elliot is the oldest of Austen’s heroines, and the longest-suffering. In order to reach her happy ending, she endures years of confinement. She isn’t literally in solitary, but – as an unmarried not-so-young woman, dependent on her demanding father, she is as trapped as any prisoner. Worse still, she has no true companionship. She is surrounded by a grotesque gallery of the neurotic and the interfering, the boring and the presumptuous. Only the reader knows Anne’s true worth. Her victorious escape from the hell of the English country house to be together with her true love, Captain Wentworth, makes her years of anguish worthwhile – almost.

2. The Peregrine by JA Baker

Chasing an elusive bird of prey around 1960s Essex, we track an even more elusive author. This was chosen by Werner Herzog as one of the course books for his Rogue Film School – where he teaches lock-picking alongside cinematography. I applied in order to make a film version of Patience, but didn’t get on. Discovering this renowned classic of nature writing was some consolation. In its pages, a man tries to escape his human nature. The final encounter between man and bird is visionary.

Hitler in his sights … Peter O’Toole in the 1976 film of Rogue Male. Photograph: TCD/Prod DB/Alamy

3. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This novel begins with the most brutal chase sequence. Ten pages in, and you’ve winced so many times your face is aching. The main character is more like an animal fleeing a pack of hounds than a human protagonist. Eventually, he is forced to go to ground. And then the tension really starts. All of this is based on the gossamer premise that an English gentleman decides one day, out of curiosity, to see if he can assassinate Adolf Hitler.

4. The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, translated by William Rodarmor

Some people escape from concrete jails. For others safe, normal life is the worst imprisonment. In 1968, Moitessier – already a legendary sailor – is planning to sail solo around the world, without touching land. He can’t be doing with shore life. When he hears about the Golden Globe yacht race, he decides to join in. He has the chance to win and gain the glory. But as he is sailing towards the finish, he realises it just another entrapment. If there’s such a thing as enlightenment, Moitessier found it halfway across the South Atlantic.

5. Tramp by Tomas Espedal, translated by James Anderson

Where Moitessier needs a bespoke sailboat, and plenty of supplies, to make his escape from the unbearableness of the day-to-day, Tomas Espedal needs only to step outside the door, decide whether to turn left or right, and just keep walking. This existentially narked Norwegian feels imprisoned by his limited world – his flat, the local bar where he drinks and then drinks some more. When this gets too much for him, he walks. But he refuses to wear hiking gear, preferring a suit. He loves to chain smoke as he goes, so as to annoy the more conservative ramblers. This is a deep and hilarious book about small truancies.

6. How to Be Gay by David M Halperin

Not everyone can run away from their captors. Some have to live with them for ever. But that doesn’t mean they have to live in the same way as them. This is a wonderful, personal history of the many ways the constraints of the straight world have been subverted or co-opted by gay culture. “Why Are the Drag Queens Laughing?” asks one section of the book. Until I read this, I can honestly say I had absolutely no idea.

A page from Hostage by Guy Delisle. Illustration: Cape

7. Hostage by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher

For the longest time, this graphic novel is confined to the limited doings and far-straying thoughts of a bearded man lying on a mattress, his left wrist handcuffed to a radiator. But what could be dull is mesmerising. It is based on interviews with Christopher Andre, who was taken hostage in 1997, while working in Chechnya for Médecins Sans Frontières. The escape is super-tense.

8. Papillon by Henri Charrière, translated by Patrick O’Brian

Another true story, Charrière’s merciless account of his incarceration in French Guiana, and his failed and successful escape bids, became a worldwide phenomenon when it was published in 1969. From childhood, I still remember the chunky paperback, with its cover image of a butterfly (papillon is French for butterfly) resting on a heavy padlock. There it was, on beaches and restaurant tables. It seemed as if my parents were reading it for most of the decade. With good reason. Some say this is the greatest of all escapes.

9. Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler

A recent discovery, this is a fictional account of a woman’s attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing “this instant-now”. Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books – getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Agua Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly.

10. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

When I asked my friends for their favourite books of escape, The Count of Monte Cristo was so frequently and fondly picked that it seems silly to leave it out. Unfortunately, I’ve never read it. And so for my ultimate selection I’m going for this novel, (sometimes known as Tiger! Tiger!). It’s a sci-fi riff on Dumas’ adventure classic, and starts with the tensest escape I know. The hero is trapped on a devastated spaceship – only a single compartment contains an air supply. And this has almost run out. From start to finish, this is a series of outlandish and nerve-shredding escapades. As, I’m sure, is The Count of Monte Cristo – into the thousand pages of which I plan to make my escape this autumn.

• Patience by Toby Litt (Galley Beggar Press, £9.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.