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Unreliable Narrators

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Alias Grace
By Atwood, Margaret
1997/10 - Anchor Books
9780385490443 Find in the Library

In "Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since "The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century.
Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.
Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What

Book Cover Herzog
By Bellow, Saul
Roth, Philip
2003/02 - Penguin Books
9780142437292 Find in the Library

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. Winner of the National Book Awards.

Book Cover Kill Your Darlings
By Blacker, Terence
2003/01 - St. Martin's Press
9780312302832 Find in the Library

Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. But when an extraordinary student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career. Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, "Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.


Book Cover Andorra
By Cameron, Peter
1998/01 - Plume Books
9780452279445 Find in the Library

A stylish novel of deceit and desire by the acclaimed author of "The Weekend". The former owner of an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco journeys to Andorra, a country both beautiful and perilous, following an unspecified accident which has left his wife and daughter dead. There he meets an array of unusual characters and falls under suspicion of murder.

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My Life as a Fake
By Carey, Peter
2005/01 - Vintage Books USA
9781400030880 Find in the Library

A BookPage Notable Title
Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how a phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing him from Melbourne to a seedy, bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.

Book Cover The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
By Christie, Agatha
2006/09 - Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
9781579126278 Find in the Library

Eight classic Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries are now available in striking hardcover editions at a paperback price: "The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Evil Under the Sun, Murder on the Orient Express, The Body in the Library, Murder at the Vicarage, A Murder is Announced," and "The A.B.C. Murders." Collect them all!

Book Cover An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
By Clarke, Brock
2007/09 - Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
9781565125513 Find in the Library

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Determined to put the past behind him after serving a ten-year prison term for torching an American landmark and killing two people in the blaze, Sam Pulsifer gets married, starts a family, buys a home, and builds a new career, but his past comes back to haunt him when the homes of notable American writers begin to go up in smoke and Sam becomes the prime suspect in the crimes.

Book Cover The Woman in White
By Collins, Wilkie
Sweet, Matthew
2003/04 - Penguin Books
9780141439617 Find in the Library

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Matthew Sweet.

Book Cover The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
By Dick, Philip K.
1991/12 - Vintage Books USA
9780679736660 Find in the Library

In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, populated by God-like--or perhaps Satanic--takeover artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas. His wit, compassion, and knife-edged irony make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch moving as well as genuinely visionary.

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Rebecca
By du Maurier, Daphne
2006/09 - Harper Perennial
9780380730407 Find in the Library

Sixty years after REBECCA was first published, Daphne du Maurier's unsurpassed masterpiece continues to enthrall readers with romance and suspense, as the second Mrs. de Winter narrates the haunting events surrounding her marriage to Maxim de Winter and her growing obsession with his first wife, the beautiful, now dead Rebecca. Includes excerpts from the author's personal notes and essays, exclusive to this edition.

Book Cover The Basic Eight
By Handler, Daniel
2006/05 - Harper Perennial
9780060733865 Find in the Library

Flannery Culp, a world-weary high school senior, is primed to take on the few remaining obstacles that stand between her and the rest of her life. If only things hadn't gotten out of control and she had stayed away from the absinthe, then she wouldn't be a topic on daytime talk shows or incarcerated.

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Gentlemen and Players
By Joanne Harris
2007/01 - HarperPerennial
9780060559151 Find in the Library

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Friendship, murder, revenge, and class conflict collide in an upper-crust English school. As a new term gets under way, a number of annoying incidents befall students and faculty, escalating to murder.

Book Cover What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel
By Heller, Zoe
2004/06 - Picador USA
9780312421991 Find in the Library

A lonely schoolteacher reveals more than she intends when she records the story of her best friend's affair with a pupil in this sly, insightful novel. "Heller writes with a precision that stirs the blood and an uncommon insight into the darker sides of love."--Nuala O'Faolain.

Book Cover We Have Always Lived in the Castle
By Jackson, Shirley
Lethem, Jonathan
2006/10 - Penguin Books
9780143039976 Find in the Library

Alone since four members of the family died of arsenic poisoning, Merricat, Constance, and Julian Blackwood spend their days in happy isolation until cousin Charles appears.

Book Cover The Debt to Pleasure
By Lanchester, John
2001/12 - Picador USA
9780312420369 Find in the Library

A "New York Times" Notable Book, "The Debt to Pleasure" is a wickedly funny ode to food as the novel's snobbish narrator instructs readers in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu.

Book Cover Pale Fire
By Nabokov, Vladimir
Rorty, Richard
1992/03 - Everyman's Library
9780679410775 Find in the Library

With an Introduction by Richard Rorty


The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.
An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit

Book Cover Spider
By McGrath, Patrick
1991/10 - Vintage Books USA
9780679736301 Find in the Library

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion.

Book Cover Fight Club
By Palahniuk, Chuck
2005/10 - W. W. Norton & Company
9780393327342 Find in the Library

Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-collar jobs and failed lives fight each other barehanded. It's the invention of Tyler Durden, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

Book Cover An Instance of the Fingerpost
By Pears, Iain M.
2000/04 - Riverhead Books
9781573227957 Find in the Library

"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state. Who poured the arsenic into the victim's brandy? The evidence points to Sarah Blundy, a servant girl....She confesses to the crime and is sentenced to be hanged.

"Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators -- a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer and an archivist -- fingers a different culprit... an erudite and entertaining tour de force". -- People

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The Egyptologist
By Phillips, Arthur
2005/05 - Random House Trade
9780812972597 Find in the Library

From the bestselling author of "Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king. This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court in turmoil.
Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancee's fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian detective sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer. An

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The Accidental
By Ali Smith
2007/04 - Anchor
9781400032181 Find in the Library

BookPage Notable Title
Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and praised for her "style, ideas, and punch" (Jeanette Winterson), Smith has produced a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, as she transfixes readers with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.

Book Cover A Confederacy of Dunces
By Toole, John Kennedy
Percy, Walker
Codrescu, Andrei
2000/05 - Louisiana State University Press
9780807126066 Find in the Library

When Walker Percy penned these prophetic words in his foreword to the first edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, he could not have known just how wide Toole's "world of readers" would become. Released by Louisiana State University Press in April 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today, there are over 1,500,000 copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages.

Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Percy dubs "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one -- who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age". I

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