Top 10 grudge holders in fiction

Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal, Canada, and lives in Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Granta among other publications.

Her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Bernstein's new novel is Study for Obedience.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books in which

the grudge holder’s ongoing refusal to forgive, the insistence on the unforgivable nature of the wrong committed, amount ... to a refusal to accept the condition of the world as it is – a refusal that is the basic precondition for a new and changed world.

One title on the list:

Lote by Shola von Reinhold

Lote’s protagonist Mathilda bears a grudge against institutions, including but not limited to the academic and literary establishments that erect canons via a process of exclusion and suppression. In the novel, Mathilda searches for traces of one of her “Transfixions”, Hermia Druitt, a forgotten Black modernist poet whose writings have mysteriously disappeared. Mathilda is a fabulous (and fabulously dressed) refusalist, as we learn when we follow her to an artist’s residency in a place called Dun, rejecting the stringent asceticism of the residency’s organisers while making use of the opportunity to pursue her own interests.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue