Your favourite unreliable narrators?

[Blink1880]

I know it can over done - but I do love a book with an unreliable narrator and looking for some inspiration.

The Need by Helen Phillips. Quite dark at times, but I liked that it captured some of the rawness of motherhood!

The History of Love by Nicole Kraus

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe. Eccentric. Dark. Baroque.

The Wasp Factory

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

The Odyssey. Emily Wilson's translation is good.

Gone Girl was excellent (although i guess even flagging that there's an unreliable narrator is a bit of a spoiler!).

Odysseus being the unreliable narrator.

Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Gillespie and I, Jane Harris
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara (her best book, IMO)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Humbert Humbert - terrifyingly well drawn and compelling and then you have to remind yourself what he is.

The Debt to Pleasure, John lanchester

I always quite liked the unreliable narrators of Daphne du Maurier's novels. Too many to list!

Richard Flanagan in The Secret History
Main character (whose name escapes me) in The Wych Elm

brilliant ideas and so many I haven’t read!

My cousin Rachel - just brilliant

The Stud by Jackie Collins has three narrators, all unreliable. Much of the enjoyment is seeing how they interpret the same events differently.

Then there was the one about the teacher and her younger work colleague, made into a film with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Can't recall the name.

@NewspaperTaxis Notes on a Scandal

That's the one!

Gullivers travels

Stevens in The Remains of the Day
Humbert Humbert in Lolita
Bridget Jones
Rachel in Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes

It’s Richard Papen in The Secret History. Is he actually unreliable, though?

Aroon St Charles in Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. A hilariously deluded narrator who thinks she’s telling the tale of her own loving parents, idyllic upbringing and her romance, when in fact her parents are monsters, her father is shagging everyone in the vicinity without her noticing, and her ‘romance’ is a cruel joke on the part of her brother and his (male) lover to cover up their sexuality.

Ah. thank you, yes, you're right about Richard. I do think he is unreliable...or at the very least wearing strongly rose tinted glasses

Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum.

Yup- came on to say this. Ugh, reading your comment gave me shivers!