Clever Books with Unreliable Narrators
Though I understand why some readers find unreliable narrators frustrating, I generally enjoy them. One of the first such books I read was Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in a Detective Fiction class years ago. I won't give anything away, but it is considered one of Christie's most controversial novels. A story told by someone we cannot fully trust adds an intriguing element of uncertainty and heightens an atmosphere of ambiguity until a revealing ending. The books I have chosen for this post are not only books with villainous or morally dubious narrators, but often ones where the person telling the story is not truly aware what the truth is at all. If you enjoy novels with unreliable narrators, I think you will enjoy one of these.
Happy reading!
1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
2. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
3. Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land
4. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Atonement by Ian McEwan
8. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
9. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
10. The Dinner by Herman Koch
11. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
12. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
13. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
14. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
15. The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
16. The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
17. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
18. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman