readers advisory for all discussion

If this has already been done, feel free to point me in the right direction and delete this.

What are your favorite books featuring unreliable narrators/examples of unreliable narrators done well?

One of my favorites is The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell. You can tell from the beginning that the narrator isn't all there, but by the end you're still trying to guess the truth.

Liar drove me absolutely bonkers, but it's certainly a well-written unreliable narrator. Lolita and Gone Girl are the two I bring up when explaining the concept of unreliable narrators to people. Imaginary Girls is one that sparked a big debate in my YA for adults book club about whether the narrator was unreliable (either it's a really weird magical realism novel or it has a really subtle unreliable narrator that requires extreme reading between the lines...or both?).

Yeah, I loved "Gone Girl." Just read "The Girl on the Train" and was kind of disappointed.

Other than that, the most recent good example of an unreliable narrator I can think of is "Kiss Me, Judas" by Will Christopher Baer (it's a trilogy but I only read the first one so far). I've heard the movie version is terrible.

Seconding Liar! It's one of those books where the truth never really comes out, though.

I also think one of the narrators of Code Name Verity fits. It's really good.

I second "The Other Typist ". Ishiguro's Butler in "Remains of the Day" is a recent favorite. It took me a while to get into but when I finished I realized how self-deluded his memory was. Oh, and the book is not a romance like the movie starring Anthony Hopkins. Downtown Abbey fans may want to give this butler's story a try.

(Nice thread. Compelled me to add "The Other Typist" to my to-read list.)

Oh, and also Shirley Jackson's novels, particularly The Haunting of Hill House.

The Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner are great--the narrator doesn't really lie to you, but he doesn't tell you the whole truth, and it makes for some great reveals later.

Apologies for necro-ing this thread but I couldn't resist. Gene Wolfe is my favorite author and he has literally built his entire (distinguished) career around unreliable narrators and I would argue none do it as well or have explored the concept so thoroughly and so subtly.

On a base level, every one of his narrators are unreliable in the same two subtle but important ways that distinguish them from most other narrators in most other novels.

1) The vast majority of his narrators are from some future scifi world, and are writing for an audience, but that audience is not you in 21st century earth. Therefore they will not explain things that are mundane to them and often don't know what details they should include. Think about someone in 1820 trying to read a contemporary mystery novel and trying to figure out what a car is based purely on context clues, since no writer would bother explaining what a car is or how it works. Wolfe has kinda ruined me in the sense that I now notice when other scifi/fantasy writers are making their narrator cater to an audience (me) that they shouldn't be aware of for the sake of clarity.

2) Wolfe's narrators habitually talk past other characters, misunderstand other characters, and misinterpret the nature and motives of other characters. Readers taking his narrator's interpretation of events and conversations as gospel will be led quite astray.

On a more complex level, each of his works explores themes of identity and memory in different ways, resulting in narrators that are unreliable in their own unique way, on top of the points above.

Some examples (spoilers):
Book of the New Sun:
(view spoiler)[ Protagonist is writing a memoir of his life (already a layer of unreliability since he's looking back on events with a different perspective than he actually had at the time, something the book actually acknowledges and plays with). In book two he gains someone else's memories and later gains potentially thousands of people's memories, revealing that we've never actually "met" the original narrator, in a sense, since he's writing this far in the future when he's sort of multiple people and sort of androgynous. We may know the events that happened to him as a child, but his original personality has been completely muddled so his actual interpretation of those events is dubious at best.

He also claims often to have a perfect memory, with evidence that both proves and disproves that assertion throughout the series. There is a solution to that particular quandary but it's impossible to explain to someone that hasn't read the books.. (hide spoiler)]

Book of the Long Sun:
(view spoiler)[One of Wolfe's rare works written in third-person, which already means something weird is going on. It's revealed at the end of the series (with a bunch of hints and foreshadowing throughout) that everything you've read was written by a young boy who revered the main character and wasn't even there for many of the events portrayed, he just heard them second-hand. So the series you read is basically a hagiography, and the protagonist was likely far more flawed in reality. (hide spoiler)]

The Sorcerer's House:
(view spoiler)[An epistolary novel of compiled letters between a recently released from prison con man and his twin brother/sister-in-law about how he was supposedly granted the lease to a magical house connected to faerie that keeps granting him wishes and growing more rooms. How much of the magic was real and how much of it was a simple con to steal his brother's identity is left up to the reader. (hide spoiler)]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus:
(view spoiler)[A series of three connected novellas set in the same two-planet system that stacks unreliability upon unreliability. The protagonist of the first novella is experimented on by his father in some way that causes progressively longer blackouts (also he's a clone, in a long line of clones, all of whom seem to wind up killing their "father").

The second novella is a history of alien aboriginal life in the style of a folk tale written by an anthropologist from earth we meet in the first novella, and whose identity may have been stolen by an aboriginal alien that wrote the story as some sort of confession or exploration of his people's past before humans arrived.

The third novella is a guard going through interviews and diary entries of that anthropologist (who may or may not now be an alien) while he's in prison. (hide spoiler)]

Peace:
(view spoiler)[What seems at first like an old man on the verge of death wandering aimlessly through his house remembering fragments of his life eventually (usually on the second reading) reveals itself to be, in fact, a horror story of sorts depicting the cyclical torture of a ghost forced to relive his life and the evils he committed but will only slyly elude to in the narrative, because he can't admit to them, which is why he's stuck. I like to call this book, "spot the murder," because if you're not paying attention you may not even notice there were any murders at all. (hide spoiler)]

Latro Series:
No spoilers necessary for this one, I'll just copy/paste the goodreads description for the first book:

"Latro, a mercenary soldier from the north, has suffered a head wound in battle and has been separated from his compatriots. He has not only lost the memory of who he is and where he is from, he has also lost the ability to remember from day to day and must live out of context in an eternal present, every day rediscovering the shreds of his identity and the nature of the world around him, aided only by a written record that he attempts to continue daily and must read every morning.

But in recompense for his unhappy condition Latro has received the ability to see and converse with invisible beings, all the gods and goddesses, ghosts and demons and werewolves, who inhabit the land and affect the lives of others, all unseen."

The Turn of the Key, by Ruth Ware
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart