Staff Picks
Who Can You Trust?: Unreliable Narrators
- Kristin A.
- Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Collection
Books with unreliable narrators are the most intriguing stories to be read. The narrator may be unintentionally misleading or deliberately deceptive, which creates tension and engagement that drives the plot and intensifies the twists. They may not always tell the truth, but they make some of the most gripping storytellers. Here are just a few stories with narrators you may not be able to trust, but you should definitely still check out.

Bunny
Published in 2019
"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author whose work has been described as "honest, searing and necessary" (Elle)" -- Provided by publisher.


Room
Published in 2010
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work. Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

Rebecca
Published in 1971
The new mistress of Manderley's Cornwall estate must constantly compete with the memory of Maxim de Winter's first wife, Rebecca

Sometimes I Lie
Published in 2018
Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn't remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

The Woman in the Window
Published in 2018
"It isn't paranoia if it's really happening ... Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn't, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, no one and nothing are what they seem."-- Provided by publisher.

Gone Girl
A Novel
Published in 2012
On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick's wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?

The Girl on the Train
Published in 2015
After witnessing something shocking, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

Elizabeth is Missing
Published in 2014
In a heartbreakingly honest meditation on memory, identity, and aging, an elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared. Convinced Elizabeth is missing and in terrible danger, Maud's search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences. As this singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud's rapidly dissolving present, the clues she discovers seem to lead to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II.

The Wife Between Us
Published in 2018
A tangle of lies binds together a divorced man, his new fiancée, and his ex-wife.


The Remains of the Day
Published in 2010
The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel -- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Published in 2006
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

Shutter Island
Published in 2006
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades--with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.

We Were Liars
Published in 2014
"Thrilling, beautiful, and blisteringly smart, We Were Liars is utterly unforgettable." - John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends'the Liars'whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart. Read it. And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE. From the Hardcover edition.

Life of Pi
Published in 2003
Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. LIFE OF PI brings together many themes including religion, zoology, fear, and sheer tenacity. This is a funny, wise, and highly original look at what it means to be human.


The Turn of the Key
Published in 2019
Rowan Caine stumbles across a lucrative job as a live-in nanny for a picture-perfect family in the Scottish Highlands. What she doesn't know is that she's stepping into a nightmare that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the events that led to her incarceration. She knows she's made mistakes, and she admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn't always ideal. She's not innocent, but she maintains she's not guilty, at least not of murder.

Before I Go to Sleep
A Novel
Published in 2011
An amnesiac attempts to reconstruct her past by keeping a journal and discovers the dangerous inconsistencies in the stories of her husband and her secret doctor.

The People in the Trees
Published in 2013
Joining an anthropologist's 1950 expedition to discover a lost tribe on a remote Micronesian island, a young doctor investigates and proves a theory that the tribe's considerable longevity is linked to a rare turtle, a finding that brings worldwide fame and unexpected consequence.