Ten top novels with unreliable narrators

Elizabeth Brooks is the author of The Orphan of Salt Winds, The Whispering House, and The House in the Orchard.

At CrimeReads she tagged ten great novels with "unreliable narrators [who] range from guardians of moral virtue, to enchanting spinners-of-yarns, to out-and-out psychopaths." One title on the list:

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller (2003).

Notes on a Scandal is the story of school teacher, Sheba Hart, and her affair with a teenaged pupil. It is also—or perhaps it is really—the story of a very twisted friendship, as told by Sheba’s colleague and confidante, Barbara Covett. Barbara, a lonely woman in her sixties, who has struggled all her life to maintain proper friendships, is deeply drawn to her younger, prettier co-worker, and an unequal friendship begins: superficial on Sheba’s part, increasingly obsessive on Barbara’s. When the illicit teacher-pupil affair becomes a public scandal, Sheba’s life implodes, and she becomes a pariah. How ‘fortunate’ then (inverted commas very much intended) that Barbara is on hand to provide comfort and protection. Notes on a Scandal is a dazzling exploration of the blurred border between love and cruelty, and it is Barbara’s voice—insinuating, needy, touching, domineering, sinister—that generates the story’s power.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Notes on a Scandal is among Charlotte Northedge's top ten novels about toxic friendships.

--Marshal Zeringue