15 Novels With Unreliable Narrators, Ranked by How Late You Catch On

Humbert Humbert is a European academic in America who fixates on a twelve year old girl, marries her mother to stay near her, and then takes her across the country by car. He narrates all of it himself, from a cell, in prose so good that generations of readers have caught themselves admiring a man describing his own crimes. That is the design, not an accident of it. The book is not on his side, and Nabokov leaves enough evidence lying around to convict him, but he hands you that evidence in the voice of the defence.

Korede is a nurse in Lagos. Her sister Ayoola is beautiful, careless and on her third dead boyfriend, and Korede is the one who arrives with bleach and gloves. The chapters run two or three pages, the jokes are dry, and the horror creeps in sideways when you notice how calmly the narrator describes what she is doing at two in the morning. She is not lying about the facts of the night. She is lying about the family, about what she owes it, and about how much of this she has already decided to keep doing.

Barbara Covett teaches history at a London state school and is near the end of a career nobody noticed. When Sheba, the new art teacher, begins an affair with a fifteen year old boy, Barbara appoints herself the friend, the witness and eventually the author of the record. The book is that record. Heller lets her be funny and exact about everybody else, which is precisely how you stop noticing what she is doing to the one person who trusts her.

Rachel rides the same commuter service past the same row of houses, invents a perfect life for a couple she can see from the window, and gets off at a station she has no business using. She also drinks until entire evenings are gone. When a woman disappears, Rachel might have seen something, might have done something, and cannot get the hours back to check. Hawkins treats the missing time as a structural problem rather than a personality quirk, which is why the book works better than its imitators.

Em is bipolar, brilliant, filthy in her humour and often in hospital. Her son narrates, and his sources are his mother on a good day, his mother on a bad one, a father who says very little, and his own memory of a childhood spent inside all of it. Every account of how his parents met comes out differently. Pinto never resolves them into one official version. The book stays inside a small Bombay flat and gets more honest the less certain it becomes.

Nick Dunne comes home to a wrecked living room and no wife. Chapters alternate between his account of the week and Amy's diary running back to the day they met, and Flynn writes both voices so cleanly that you can hold two contradictory marriages in your head at once. Everything around them is doing work too: the dead Missouri town, the recession, the television coverage, the in-laws who wrote children's books about their daughter. Then the novel hits its midpoint and quietly becomes a different kind of book.

The narrator is never given a first name. She is young, poor and married to a widower she hardly knows, and she moves into a house where the staff, the furniture and the daily timetable are all still arranged around Rebecca. Du Maurier has her narrating from years later, older and apparently calm, which ought to be reassuring and does the opposite. Almost everything she believes about the dead woman is information handed to her by people with reasons to shape it.

The narrator audits car crash settlements for a living and has not slept properly in months. He starts crying at cancer support groups because it works. Then he meets Tyler, they open a club in a bar basement, and the club stops being about fighting. Palahniuk writes in flat short declaratives that read like a man reciting a manual he has memorised, which is less a style choice than a symptom. The film is the famous one, the book is meaner and funnier, and the last pages go somewhere else entirely.

Teddy Daniels lands on an island off Boston in 1954 to investigate a woman who has walked out of a locked room. The staff are polite and useless, the doctors are far more interested in him than in her, and the storm keeps everybody in place. Lehane writes it as a pulp detective story with every dial turned up, so the weather and the dread carry you past questions you should be asking. Underneath the machinery there is grief, and the grief is doing more work than the plot is.

Kathy narrates in her thirties, looking back at Hailsham and at two friends she has never managed to untangle herself from. She is calm, orderly, slightly pedantic about the sequence of events, and she never once raises her voice. Ishiguro gives you the situation in pieces, mostly through things the children half heard from adults and then repeated wrongly to each other. Very little happens loudly. By the time you understand the arrangement, you have accepted it the way they did, which is the cruel part.

Briony Tallis wants to be an author, which mostly means she wants the world to have a shape she can recognise. During one long summer day at her family's house she watches her sister and the housekeeper's son, misreads a scene between them, and gives her version to adults who are ready to believe a clever child. The novel then follows what her sentence costs, through the retreat to Dunkirk and a wartime London hospital, in some of the best prose McEwan has written.

Stevens has served Darlington Hall for decades and believes his life adds up to something he calls dignity. He drives west to visit a former housekeeper, and along the way he recalls the great years of the house, the conferences, the standards, the staff plans. What he does not say is where he was standing during the political business of the nineteen thirties, or what he felt about Miss Kenton while she was still there. Ishiguro writes him in careful mannered sentences that keep clearing their throat.

Tony Webster is comfortable, divorced, mildly pleased with how reasonable he has been about everything. A solicitor's letter concerning a diary sends him back through his friendship with Adrian and his awkward first relationship with Veronica. Barnes writes him in the tone of a man giving evidence he has rehearsed in the car on the way over. The book runs under two hundred pages without a spare paragraph, which is why I hand it to people who tell me they have no time to read.

Christie gives you a country house murder, a retired Belgian detective with a new interest in vegetable marrows, and a narrator who is the village doctor and Poirot's assistant through the investigation. For most of its length the pleasure is standard Christie: everybody has a secret, the timings matter enormously, the servants know more than they say. Then the final chapter arrives and turns the book into an argument that crime writers have been having with each other ever since.

The book is arranged as a foreword, a poem in four cantos, and a very long commentary. The commentator, Charles Kinbote, is supposed to be explaining John Shade's poem and instead uses each line as a doorway into his own story about a deposed king of a country called Zembla. You can read the poem straight through, or hop between the notes the way he instructs, and the two routes give you different books. Nabokov never comes in to settle who is inventing whom.