Seven unreliable narrators who fool you brilliantly

The most unsettling trick in fiction is a narrator you slowly stop trusting. When the voice telling the story is hiding something — from you, or from themselves — every page becomes a puzzle. Here are the masters of it.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is the quiet devastation: a butler whose careful account of a dignified life slowly reveals everything he refused to feel. Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train hands the story to an alcoholic whose blackouts make her doubt her own memory — and yours. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl weaponizes unreliability into one of the great plot twists of the century.

The darkest examples put you inside a monster's head and make you complicit. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita dazzles you with beautiful prose from a predator, and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley makes you root, uneasily, for a killer covering his tracks.

And Donna Tartt's The Secret History shows the subtler kind: a narrator so desperate to belong that his own account can't be trusted. What unites them all is the same thrill — the moment you realize the person telling you the story has been lying, and you have to reread everything you thought you knew.