The best books featuring unreliable narrators

Shirley Jackson is perhaps best known for The Haunting of Hill House, but her final work, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is masterful. The novel is narrated from the knowing perspective of eighteen-year-old Merricat Blackwood.

In the wake of the murder of their family, Merricat lives with her preternaturally serene sister Constance and their Uncle Julian. Six years earlier, the rest of their family died from arsenic poisoning at dinner, Julian being the sole survivor – Merricat had been sent to her room without supper, and Constance, who avoided consuming the poisoned sugar, was tried for murder and ultimately acquitted.

It is questionable as to how far Merricat is an unreliable narrator. In the first paragraph of the novel, Merricat states matter-of-factly, "Everyone else in my family is dead." However, Merricat’s unique perspective enables Jackson to hide certain truths of the story in plain sight, namely, to what extent each of Merricat and Constance are, or are not, the Blackwoods’ murderers.

The novel is an inversion of the haunted house trope, as the Blackwood sisters barricade themselves in their house, fearing their neighbours. Part macabre fairy-tale and, in part, a love story between two sisters, it is Merricat’s voice which makes the novel so memorable.

This book features a brilliant narrative voice. The title paraphrases William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Protagonist Janina’s neighbour, nicknamed Big Foot, is found dead in the first of a number of local murders as hunters become the hunted. 65-year-old Janina has a greater affinity with the local deer than the victims and their love of hunting.

It is Janina’s perspective that makes the narrative so gripping. Set in a remote Polish village, it has the pace of a thriller, and her voice combines humour with deeply troubled questions about humanity’s place in the world. On watching a pregnant woman reading a newspaper, she wonders: "How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?" Janina’s first-person narration enables us to see how far she is misjudged and overlooked by her community.

I recently discovered Reid’s writing and I love the slow literary suspense of Foe, his twist relying upon an unreliable first-person narrator.

Farmer Junior is selected by lottery as a possible candidate for an off-world workforce colonising space. The narrative takes place on earth, however, and it is a domestic portrait of a marriage as much as it is science fiction. Junior is a transparent and sincere narrator. His unreliability comes from what he himself does not know and his hazy memory of his own past. ("Everything blends into a nebulous fog.")

His narrative reveals more than he realises, including through his treatment of a horned beetle in their closet. As with the best fiction, it holds a mirror up to our own humanity. 

I find it interesting when first-person unreliable narrators pose a moral dilemma for the reader: how far we sympathise with a character who may or may not be culpable of a crime.

From the very opening of the novel, we are told, "Tonight will be my first night under house arrest." Ruth Ardingly has just been released from prison to serve out a sentence of house arrest for arson and suspected murder (after the death of her seven-year-old grandson) at her farm, The Well. Returning to The Well, Ruth must piece together the tragedy that shattered her marriage and tore her family apart, amid the backdrop of a drought-ridden country, where, miraculously, The Well has water.

The novel is told retrospectively by Grandmother Ruth, whose narrative reliability is impacted by both memory and grief. 

Many contemporary thrillers’ ultimate twist hinges on the use of an unreliable narrator. One of the best is Alex Michaelides’ internationally bestselling debut, The Silent Patient. It follows a psychotherapist trying to help his patient, Alicia, recover after she refuses to speak following the murder of her husband.

The novel is a perfect balancing act of suspecting Alicia yet finding her sympathetic in equal measure. I did not, for one moment, anticipate the ending and first-person unreliable narration is key to Michaelides’ masterful twist.