The novels that lie to you

What makes a novel an unreliable-narrator novel rather than a novel with a liar in it

A novel counts as an unreliable-narrator novel when the narration and the book disagree and the book gives the reader the means to notice. A dishonest character inside a story told by someone else is just a dishonest character. The device requires that the deceived party is the reader. Two conditions have to hold at once. The narrating voice must be the reader's only supply of information, so there is no channel round it. And the text must leak, planting corroborations, contradictions and misfitting tones that let a second version assemble underneath the first.

That is why lists circulating on Goodreads and Reddit are worth using with care. They tend to gather famous narrators who are villains, addicts or children, which is a different category. A murderer who tells you plainly that he is a murderer is a reliable narrator with an unpleasant subject.

The classics that set the pattern

The classics established every move the modern books still use, and four of them cover the whole range. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) filters almost everything through a housekeeper with loyalties and a long memory, which is unreliability by interest. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) is built so that a governess who sees ghosts and a governess who is unwell fit the same pages exactly, which is unreliability by ambiguity. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) turned the evasive narrator into a mechanism and caused a genuine scandal about fair play. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) made self-justification the whole texture of the prose, and his Pale Fire (1962) went further, giving the annotations of a commentator who has annexed someone else's poem.

The modern working list, by the kind of unreliability it runs on

The modern list sorts cleanly by kind, and the kind is the useful label. These are novels where the device is load-bearing, not ornamental.

• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989): evasive. A butler recounts a career in a register precisely calibrated to avoid the two subjects the reader can see him circling.
• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (1996): mistaken. The narrator is wrong about a fact concerning himself, and reports everything else accurately.
• Atonement, Ian McEwan (2001): lying, and only at the last. The novel reveals the status of the account it has been giving, which retrospectively rewrites the preceding several hundred pages.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver (2003): evasive. A mother writes letters about her son with a case to make and a share of the responsibility to place elsewhere.
• Notes on a Scandal, Zoë Heller (2003): evasive. The narrator presents herself as the sane observer of somebody else's disgrace.
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012): lying. One half of the alternating narration is a document composed for a future reader who is not you, which is the cleanest example of the type in modern fiction.
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (2011): mistaken. A retired man's memory of an old friendship turns out to have edited itself over 40 years.
• The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins (2015): mistaken. Blackouts remove the narrator's own evidence from her, so she investigates herself without knowing it.
• The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks (1984): evasive. A horror-adjacent narrator withholds one fact about their own history that reorganises the book.
• American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis (1991): mistaken, arguably. The novel declines to confirm whether the events reported occurred at all.

The narrators who are not lying at all

The narrators who are not lying at all are the naive ones, and a naive narrator can be entirely honest and still leave the reader with a different story from the one being told. Children make the most exact cases. Emma Donoghue's Room (2010) is narrated by a boy of 5 who describes a captivity he has no word for. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) gives a teenage narrator who records his parents' behaviour with complete accuracy and reads none of it. Age is not what the category runs on, though: Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1966) puts the whole arc in the progress reports of a man in his thirties, and what he cannot yet read in his own life is the gap the reader works in.

Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004) belongs in this group and is the reason this reference exists. Its narrator is 9 years old, unconscious in a hospital bed, and cheerfully certain that the run of accidents he lists is a matter of luck. He conceals nothing. He lacks the frame. The reader assembles the alternative explanation out of material the boy hands over without recognising what it is.

Which of these survived the crossing to film

The crossing to film is where the sorting by kind pays off: the naive books arrive more or less intact, the lying books arrive as thrillers, and the evasive books lose the most, because evasion is invisible on camera. The distance column below is a judgement about the narration specifically, not about plot fidelity.

Several of the strongest books on the list have no feature film at all, and the pattern in the refusals is informative. Pale Fire puts its device in the annotation of a poem. The Wasp Factory puts it in a withheld piece of the narrator's own history. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has been staged rather than filmed, and the stage keeps a narrating voice that a camera would have to argue with. A novel whose whole mechanism is the shape of what the narrator leaves out gives a lens nothing to point at.

Where to go next

THE DEVICEThe unreliable narratorWhat an unreliable narrator is, in novels and in filmTHE DEVICEReliable against unreliableReliable and unreliable narrators in the novel, side by sideTHE DEVICEThe unreliable narrator in moviesUnreliable narrators in filmTHE GENREPsychological thriller books, sorted by mechanismPsychological thriller novels worth reading