Araminta Hall

Steve Thomas: Araminta, welcome to the podcast.

Araminta Hall: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Steve Thomas: I think the title, Unreliable Narrator, is a great one for a suspense novel like this because it automatically, I think, knocks the reader back on your heels a little bit of “Oh, what am I getting into here? I’m not sure what to trust, even from the very beginning.” Was that an early part of the process of writing the book, the title? It feels almost integral to it.

Araminta Hall: Yeah, no, it wasn’t actually. I didn’t come up with the title for a while, and it feels, it still feels ridiculously meta to call a thriller Unreliable Narrator. And actually, the truth is every novel I’ve ever written probably could’ve been called Unreliable Narrator. And in fact, I feel like every thriller, just novels in general. I was writing a feature yesterday about this, and I was thinking that I was hard pushed to think of a book in any genre that doesn’t have an unreliable narrator, and I think that’s just because it is such a human condition. We are all unreliable, and we all see things in different ways, and we interpret things in different ways.

But also, I think the most interesting part of being an unreliable narrator is that we all lie to ourselves to varying degrees about, for most of us, it’s silly little things like, “I’m definitely gonna go on a run tomorrow.” And you’re definitely not gonna go on a run tomorrow. But obviously, what thriller writers do is they take that whole idea, and they give their character something really huge that they’re gonna lie to themselves about.

And I find that so much more interesting than just a liar. A liar, you know where you are. And also, I also find it really difficult in novels when your narrator lies to the reader and at the end of the novel says, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you this really big bit of information that would’ve helped you work out what was going on page 10,” and I just think it’s really interesting that we watch a character work themselves out in the same way that we’ll watch a plot work itself out.

But the reason that I decided to call this novel Unreliable Narrator is because it’s a book very much about storytelling. My two main protagonists are both either writers or want to be writers. And so it just felt because I was thinking a lot about not just the stories we tell ourselves, but the stories we actually put out into the world, it felt like the right title for this book.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And in this book there is that clash between those two of there’s a real story, and then there’s multiple overlapping stories of what really happened and what was fictionalized. It’s hard to tell, and you don’t know, obviously, until the end, we won’t say what it is, what the actual story is. You’re even reading somebody’s journal for a big chunk of the book, and it’s like you think they’re telling the truth, but as you said, we’re all telling our own truths, and so how is she seeing the world?

Araminta Hall: That part of the book wasn’t a journal for a long time, and then I just thought, journals are such an interesting form of writing, because we don’t write journals expecting anyone else to read it. So if we wanna lie to ourselves, it’s the perfect place to do it. And, by virtue of the fact of time, we never put everything into a journal, so it’s a really interesting form of writing.

And then of course, the second half of the book operates much more as a traditional novel. I just really enjoyed those two structures, just ’cause I think it really says a lot. This book talks a lot, I think, one of my preconceptions when I was writing it was thinking about how certain types of people get to tell their stories and certain types of narratives are listened to, and certain voices are listened to. And Hope, my main protagonist, is not someone who is traditionally listened to. And so I think it’s really interesting to watch her find a way to be heard, basically. So I wanted to do that in a few different ways, basically.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And that was a good way. I was actually surprised when I was reading it, ’cause I was like, “Oh, this journal part just goes on for a long time.” But I liked it ’cause it was a unique kind of… a lot of books you’ll see it’ll go back and forth. This chapter’s a journal, this chapter’s just the detective and whatever. But it was, I think it helped to have her narrative or her journal narrative all together at once, and you get inside of her head and really get how she’s seeing things.

Araminta Hall: Yeah, and I think it’s then more shocking when her narrative is challenged, ’cause when you’ve really invested in something as a reader, and you’ve only been told one point of view, it’s quite good to be sort of shocked out of that and just think, “Oh, God, of course.” As in life, there are lots of points of view. But we all do that. We get in our heads and we think that how we’ve seen something is the way it happened. But actually, so many people will tell you a different version.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. We don’t wanna give any spoilers here, but there are lots of twists and turns and such, but how do you describe the book to people? I’m afraid just describing it I’m gonna give too much away.

Araminta Hall: Yeah, no, I know what you mean. The book opens with Hope discovering that the worst thing she’s ever done has been made into a best-selling novel by this celebrated novelist who she worked for 10 years ago. And he is really part of the British establishment. He lives in this grand country house in the middle of nowhere, and she goes to be his live-in assistant, and she’s seduced by this life of bohemian glamour that him and his wife and all the people around them live in. And there’s this young man who lives with them who’s not their son, but is sort of adopted by them, and she becomes really close to him. So it’s this sort of explosion of this world that is so alien, like we are all outsiders looking into it.

But we know that obviously something happened because she’s so shocked, right at the beginning of the novel, she’s so shocked to see this story on the page. And so like I said, the novel is very much about her trying to work out exactly what her story is and then working out a way that she can tell her story, because it feels like this powerful man has just taken her whole life and turned it into fiction and used all her words and everything.

Steve Thomas: There’s a lot about different ways of telling the same story. She’s trying to get it resolved of what to do about it, and she brings other people in. There’s a detective later in the story, and that was interesting too, because she’s got her own journey she’s going on too. She’s having identity crisis as with everybody else, and that’s another way of her telling her own story to herself.

Araminta Hall: When she left Shadowlands, which is the name of the house where the novelist, who’s called Ambrose Glencourt, where he lives, when she left, he made her promise never to say what had happened there. So that’s one of the reasons she’s so shocked to see this. She spent the last 10 years living a very small, she drinks a bit too much. She doesn’t really have any friends. She’s really isolated herself because she’s holding this massive secret that she feels incredibly guilty about. And then she sees, “Oh my God, he’s just written, he’s just put it out into the world, and nothing’s happened.”

So she actually goes to the police with this story. But of course it’s hard to be listened to when you are, you look like a slightly weird, drunk woman hasn’t really got their shit together. What you say doesn’t hold any weight. And then of course, yeah, she starts to question if actually she’s remembered anything correctly. That makes the journal, I think, feel even more quite dream-like, and she says quite a lot of times in the journal, “I want to write this really well, ’cause I want to be a novelist.” So we know that she’s got that side to her as well, where she wants to make up stories. That’s what novelists do. So yeah, there’s that whole tension between what’s truth and what’s fiction.

Steve Thomas: Even to the characters themselves, like she in particular is questioning herself, but it gets really deep into that, just even what is the nature of truth itself, is there an objective truth?

Araminta Hall: I don’t think there is. I think that is the thing. There are facts, there are actual facts, and if you tell someone the wrong fact, you’ve lied. And someone in this book is actually lying, which is, that’s part of the thing of working out who’s lying and who’s the unreliable narrator? That’s part of this novel, so I’m obviously not gonna give too much away about that.

But beyond actual facts, there are so many versions of the truth, and it’s really hard to say who’s right or who’s wrong. Often it’s just to do with how you felt, and the other person might not even know that you were feeling that, and you might not have articulated something properly. So yeah, I’m playing a lot with those ideas.

Steve Thomas: And there are people who will intentionally manipulate those facts to get to their own story of how things happened.

Araminta Hall: And I think that’s really, this book is, a lot of it’s about privilege. We, and I know you have the same in America, you have a problem with privileged people ruling but in the UK we have such a long tradition of privilege and inherited wealth, even our system of government. We have a House of Lords, which is just, people become, people govern our country because they’ve inherited a title. It is all kinds of crazy, and Ambrose Glencourt comes from that world, where he is just, he can’t conceive of a world in which his opinion doesn’t matter or his words aren’t heard. I really wanted to talk about that in the book.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you do explore why he’s listened to more than Hope is, and more than even Ambrose’s wife and Tom, and they’re all different but you also, I think you challenge it enough to where you’re like, “Am I being biased toward him? Maybe he is telling the truth, ’cause I automatically think that, oh, the rich, privileged person is lying…” so that’s why it’s always in the air in the whole book of I don’t know. It could be.

Araminta Hall: And there are points at which they’re all telling their own truths. That’s the other thing. So they are all authentic characters in that, I really wanted to be sure of that. I didn’t want to have someone in there who was just an out and out liar. They’ve all lied about certain things, and they’re all lying to themselves, but also there are points at which they’re all being truthful.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and the journal part obviously is in first person because she’s writing it as her journal, and then the rest of the book is whatever we call that, omniscient third person, ’cause we still get inside their heads. You said it wasn’t originally the journal. What point in the book do you feel like you were like “this part should be the journal,” or was that an editor or a friend or somebody that suggested that?

Araminta Hall: No, I think it was me. God, it goes through so many editing processes that I’m pretty sure that was me. I’m sure I discussed it with my agent and my editor, but it just felt like I was always writing that part in first person and then I always knew I wanted the second part to be like that close third perspective and those are the two ways I enjoy writing the most.

And it just came to me that I wanted it to feel as close to being in Hope’s mind as I could because I wanted it to be absolutely just her point of view so specifically for that first bit that the journal just seemed like the most logical way to do it. I was a little bit scared of doing it, I have to say, because, it is sometimes challenging, a journal. Sometimes when I open a novel and there’s a journal, I’m like, “Oh, God.” It’s a bit like reading someone’s dreams. I did feel a little bit scared of it, but I hope because I’ve done it from the point of view of a character who is not just self-deluded but wants to be a writer as well, I hope I’ve made it feel like we’re also reading a composed written work.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And she’s obviously in a vulnerable place. She is at the very beginning of the book, but then the flashback when she goes to work for Rosie at Shadowlands, she’s in a very vulnerable place, and she’s almost there because her mom found this job for her, and she’s like, “You need to get away from all this,” ’cause she had just had an affair with someone, so she’s in a very vulnerable place, which I think is not a great place for her then at Shadowlands.

Araminta Hall: As it turns out, it’s the worst place for her to go. But also it’s the reason that Rosie and Delia chose her, because they needed a vulnerable person really. And I just think that I’m always very aware of not making my characters too good or too bad. ‘Cause obviously we’re not, humans are not like that. So it would’ve been easy for her to have been this sort of naive young woman who’s full of hope and all that sort of thing. But no, she’s, she’s battle weary from life. She’s only 23, but she’s already gone through a bit. She’s made some terrible decisions. She does need to go away, which is unusual for a 23-year-old. Most 23-year-olds haven’t quite burnt as many bridges. So yeah, I really wanted to make sure that she doesn’t come into this as this sort of innocent, that she’s got reasons for being there herself, which might not be that great.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and she goes through quite an emotional journey there. We won’t go into details or anything, but because it’s a journal, again, you’re getting at the really emotional version of a lot of those things, ’cause that’s the reason she’s writing it down is ’cause something just happened. Some things you feel sorry for her, some things you’re going, “no, don’t do that,” you can see what’s coming…

Araminta Hall: No, completely. And she has big emotions when she’s there. She falls in love, literally and figuratively, while she’s there. The whole lifestyle is just so alien to her, obviously, as it would be to most people. She’s learning about a whole different way of life, which is really seductive, and it’s the middle of this heatwave, and it’s this incredibly beautiful place, so it does, it feels almost like she’s stepped onto a film set or something, which is really compelling, especially when you’re 23, I think.

That was the other thing, working out how old she is, because she had to be young enough to not be cynical. I think, when you get a bit older, as the police in the second part, the police detective, Natalie, she’s quite cynical about the Glencourts. We all have lived through enough being governed by privileged people. For most people, you get to a certain age and you’re just really cynical about it, and Hope had to be at that age where she was overawed by it, but also she was old enough to have had all these experiences and to take part in all these experiences.

Steve Thomas: You don’t want her to be so young that you really feel like she’s being abused by these people immediately, where you’re like, “Oh they’re just clearly taking advantage of her,” where, they do to some extent, but she’s fully into it as well, but not so old that you’re like you see right through it.

Araminta Hall: Yeah, that’s why I enjoyed actually having the Natalie character later on because it was like I wanted to see that world through the eyes of a slightly older person who’s a bit sick of all that.

Steve Thomas: And is that idea of who controls the narrative something that was part of your thought process from the beginning? Or did that evolve throughout it?

Araminta Hall: Yeah, no, absolutely. We’ve, the same as you’ve had in America, we’ve had a succession of appalling men leading us, and you just, you can’t explain why they’ve been voted for. You realize actually it’s because there’s this huge overlying narrative in our societies. We just worship wealth and privilege, in the UK it’s very much like to do with families and connections. And all these people go to the same schools, then on to the same universities. They all give each other jobs. And in the UK right now, we are just about to change our prime minister two years into a five-year term, which, it’s be our seventh prime minister in 10 years, which is just embarrassing.

And the media’s just talking about who’s gonna be given which job and then they went to school with so-and-so, and they did this and that. And you just think, there’s no who’s the best person for this job. It’s not like any other role where you would interview or you’d have to go up to a board or something. Yeah, I’ve been so depressed by politics in the last 10 years that it was really, that was almost my starting point, actually, for the whole novel, wanting to talk about that.

Steve Thomas: When did you spark on this particular idea of this girl going off to this place and working with an author?

Araminta Hall: I was thinking about someone, ’cause I thought about him being a politician for a while, and then I just thought, “I think it would be too complicated.” He would be so involved in the world, and he would be much more careful. Because a lot of it is about who gets to tell your story, I was thinking, “Yeah, what if I made him an actual storyteller?” Because also, that class of people in the UK, they just get to be who they want to be, and a lot of them, not so much now, when I was certainly growing up, a lot of them did become novelists. And you think, it’s crazy. People try forever to be a novelist. These people just know, their uncle run a publishing company or something. So I just thought, actually, it’s such a good way in, for the whole idea of storytelling and narrative voice and all that, and then obviously being a novelist myself, I was thinking, “Oh, yeah, I don’t have to really do any research!”

Steve Thomas: Was that a fun part of it to explore then when you settled on writer, was like, “Ooh, I get to explore some stuff with writing, too?”

Araminta Hall: Totally. It was really fun, that whole idea. I’m always thinking about that when I’m writing about how truthful you have to be about things, and then, anyway, the whole thing is made up. Writing is a mad profession. Sitting and just making stuff up and living with these people in your head who are never gonna exist, but who feel really real to you, so yeah, it was fun to … I don’t know. Sometimes it was fun to think about it, and sometimes it made me feel a bit weird.

Steve Thomas: One of the things I thought was funny, which is not even part of the main part of the plot, but Rosie always keeps telling her all these rules of writing, “you have to do this. You have to do that,” and there’s nothing you have to do as a writer!

Araminta Hall: Someone like Rosie would think that. He thinks everything he does is right. It’s like he tells her what books to read. He asks her who she likes reading, and then he’s “Oh no, those, they’re terrible. Read these people,” sort of thing. Whereas, most people in life are open to ideas. He’s not, which is so ironic for a writer. He’s not open to ideas. He has just got a set view of the world.

Steve Thomas: And he likes the kinds of books and doesn’t like the kinds of books that you would expect of someone like him. She goes, “I read Jane Austen,” or something like that. He’s “Oh, that’s garbage,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but come read this Joseph Conrad!

Brief aside, you’ve mentioned you don’t get to see your characters exist in the real world, but you did have an adaptation of one of your books on Apple TV. What is that process like? Is that strange to see your characters on the screen?

Araminta Hall: It’s wild, the process. It’s been absolutely amazing. I was lucky. It was a book of mine called Imperfect Women, and it was bought by Elizabeth Moss’s production company. And yeah, it’s just been incredible. It’s so exciting, and I so believe that when you write a book, as soon as it goes into the world, it’s open to a million different interpretations. It’s like you don’t own the right to say, “This is how I want my book to be read, and this is what I want you to get out of it.” And giving it to a TV production company, it’s like a huge version of that, ’cause you also get to see it.

They changed some things. What I loved about it was they really kept to the bones of the story and the structure. And yeah, obviously, for TV you have to add more story and they changed things that weren’t gonna work, and it’s way more glamorous than my novel is. It was so fun, and I went out to see it being filmed, and yeah, it was just amazing. It’s been a really brilliant experience.

Steve Thomas: It’s funny, that’s another example of you don’t own that story. You own your novel, and the story itself is your intellectual idea, but any book, once you release it into the world, legally to make it into a movie they have to get your permission and all that stuff, but they can adapt it and people who read it can think of it differently.

Araminta Hall: Also they’re not gonna buy the rights to a book unless they believe in the central part of it. So I think you’re really unlucky as a novelist if your book is changed so much that you start to disagree with what they’re saying or something.

Steve Thomas: Speaking of the writing process, at one point Rosie calls authors burglars of life. He’s very much a burglar of life, but I think authors in general are looking at things and taking things and putting them in. But where do you think the line is between appropriating real things and fictionalizing ’cause that’s part of the story here. How much do you think you can ethically do that?

Araminta Hall: It’s inevitable that you are going to put parts of yourself and people you’re close to into stories, and it’s also inevitable that you are going to take what’s happening in the world and have that influence your story. But I think there’s a really big difference to that and actually writing about someone’s life without their permission. I can’t imagine doing that. I do that thing that all writers do. I’ll be sitting on a bus or something and I’ll overhear a conversation and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s brilliant,” and maybe a little part of it will make its way in or a friend might have a certain mannerism, all those sorts of things. But yeah, I would never write someone’s story without talking to them first. It would be friendship ending, wouldn’t it?

I really enjoy novels where a really big historical event or something is taken and then the novelist has imagined themselves into that person. I love that.

The thing is, we do all burgle life. That is what novelists do to a certain extent, but I think there are good and bad ways of doing that.

Steve Thomas: There’s historical fiction where it’s clear that, if you’re writing a book about King George III and it’s from his point of view okay, then you know that’s not actually written by him and it’s the author doing it, so you kinda get the idea there.

Araminta Hall: I wrote a novel about, oh, four novels ago. My great-grandfather survived the Titanic, and he wrote a book about it. And obviously his daughter was my grandmother, and I spoke to her loads about him and everything, and I wrote a fictionalized account. And it was really weird, because even though all my family were, like, on board with it and everything and obviously everyone knows what happened in the Titanic, and he wrote this factual book about it, so I knew what he thought about the sinking, and I also knew what he thought about the aftermath. And I knew what sort of person he was, ’cause I spoke to so many people. But I did in the end have to make him up and give him desires and needs, and all these things, and conflicts, and it felt really strange.

And yeah, and there were parts of him that I made not very nice. There were parts of him that people told me weren’t very nice, because that’s true of everybody. It was such an interesting process doing that, actually. That was a bit weird.

Steve Thomas: That was an interesting part of the book, the Ministry of Time from a couple years ago, where there’s some time travel stuff, but the author, she based those characters that they plucked from time on real people. They had very little information about them, ’cause they weren’t super famous people, but there’s enough journals, extrapolating out who they would be, and then how they would be in the modern world was obviously completely fictional. But that was an interesting part of that book, I thought.

Araminta Hall: No, I totally agree. I love all that. I love it when authors play around like that.

Steve Thomas: You mentioned that because this was a book about writing you didn’t have to do much research. What kind of stuff did you do research on in this book? Did you have to research a place like Shadowlands or anything like that?

Araminta Hall: The British countryside is littered with places like Shadowlands. And a lot of them you’re allowed to go in. So I’ve often gone in, for loads of my life I’ve gone in. The National Trust is an amazing organization in the UK, and you can go and look at so many of those houses, and it has so much art. So I feel like if you live in the UK, you know those buildings really well. And then I live in Brighton and, we’re surrounded by beautiful countryside and I, just going on walks you walk past houses like that. Yeah, I didn’t feel like I needed… I feel like, for the British audience, it’s just so instantly recognizable, all that stuff. But yeah, so I didn’t, yeah, unfortunately I didn’t go and get to stay in one for a week or something. That would’ve been nice.

Steve Thomas: And then, the last thing I wanted to ask, you do teach creative writing as well. The process of teaching writing, does that change how you view writing? Like, when you’re working with students, is that always changing up how you’re thinking about things?

Araminta Hall: Oh, completely. Absolutely. I do this course, they’re called like master classes, and I just come into a program and I will give this day or couple of hours for everyone creating suspense, and it is fascinating, ’cause I’ve given that class so many times, and every time I feel like I learn something from something that a student says. Just chatting about something, it clarifies it in your mind.

Which is why I think, I’ve got two friends down here, we have a writer’s group, and we’ve known each other for years and years. We’re all published novelists, and we meet about once a month or six weeks or something, and we just talk about what we’re working on. And sometimes you go and you think, “I haven’t really got anything to say,” but it’s fine, ’cause, sometimes someone’s got more to say. But you realize that, my God, every time you start talking and then someone will ask you a question, and then you go off, and even when you’re solving someone else’s problem you’re working stuff out yourself. So that I think is one of my biggest pieces of a- advice for people writing, is find yourself a writer’s group.

And that’s what teaching is a bit like. I don’t look at it as I have all the knowledge and I’m imparting everything to you, but I’ve been doing it for so long, I certainly know some tricks, and then I can talk to them about it, and then we do a few writing exercises and then talk about it. I love teaching. I would actually love to do more of it, but yeah, it’s a lot of time teaching.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. It’s like you’re leading your own writer’s group there. You’re the leader of it and you’re facilitating the conversations but you’re just getting them to talk.

Araminta Hall: Exactly. No, completely. And yeah, they often come up with way better ideas than I could have done.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s how I prefer to do all of my work at work. Whenever we’re coming up with programs for the library or whatever, I wanna have a big brainstorming group and people talking and bouncing off ideas. People would be appalled by my notes for this podcast, ’cause I don’t write out questions. I’ve just got kind of things, and so I just pop from thing to thing. Because I wanna use the conversation that we’re having to go, “Oh that kind of reminds me of this and that,” and jump around.

Araminta Hall: Totally. That’s how I think. That’s how I write a book. People would be appalled to see my lack of planning. But I’m just like, if I get into it, I’m going to work it out.

Steve Thomas: So I, yeah, I’ve asked a couple of other… are you one of those that just starts and goes and doesn’t have the end exactly in mind? Or do you know the end at least?

Araminta Hall: Yeah. The one thing I do normally know is the end, because I feel like I need a destination, otherwise it really does feel like jumping into the dark. And how the end structures itself in the end will change, but I know what I want. I don’t think I’ve ever written a novel where I’ve massively changed an ending, because I I have needed that point. But I know what I’m trying to talk about. I know what sort of my overarching theme is.

I obviously have thought about the characters and who they’re gonna be. For me, the first draft is working out the characters and not even the plot. Sometimes the plot does, or no, actually, I’d say never does the plot fall together in the first draft. It’s just really working out who these people are and what this world is and what I’m trying to say. And then I feel like you can make a plot work. I think making plots work is easier than anything really because If you haven’t got a good character, no one’s really gonna care, are they?

Steve Thomas: ‘Cause there’s only so many plots, and so you’re kinda mixing and matching elements and…

Araminta Hall: the twist is always quite important as well, or surprise or whatever it is, but you can get there in lots of different ways normally I find.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And from the end of the book, which we won’t say anything about, I can see from the end of the book where you started from ’cause I can say, “Oh, okay,” ’cause what happens at the end I can see how the, how that was the germination of what came forward.

Araminta Hall: Totally.It is. Exactly. That is the culmination of my idea. And that last paragraph of the novel I really wrote in my first draft. It has not changed that much. And, everything else changed amazingly. And I always like that feeling. If you’ve got your last paragraph down, it is like driving somewhere, there are many ways to reach your destination. But you have to know where you’re heading for.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s the analogy I’ve used before that I heard from somewhere, that you’re gonna start in London, you’re gonna end in Paris, but where you go in between, up to you. You can take an airplane, you can take a car, you can take a bus, whatever. Yeah. But yeah. It’s the journey that gets there, but knowing the end…

Araminta Hall: You need to know that you end in Paris, yeah.

Steve Thomas: We don’t know, in a novel how it’s written, at the end. I don’t know if you outlined it, detailed, or if you went, like, you wrote it. But you can see that sometimes in TV shows and stuff where, you didn’t know how this was gonna end. Just this is a complete mess now.

Araminta Hall: But especially now that TV shows are made in series and you don’t know if you’re gonna be commissioned for the next series. TV writers have a hard job because it’s like they have to end a series satisfyingly. They also have to end it with the hope they’re gonna be commissioned to write the next one. In fact, I think it’s true. Of course they don’t know what the end is gonna be. I don’t think anyone ever says “we’re commissioning you to write three series of this.” So, yeah, that is a terrifying thing to do.

Steve Thomas: ‘Cause the people who even did Imperfect Women might go, “We want Imperfect Women 2.” I don’t know how that works.

Araminta Hall: And you’d have to pivot entirely. Exactly.

Steve Thomas: Araminta, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the book. It was good twists and turns. I think we successfully avoided spoilers.

Araminta Hall: I don’t think we spoiled it at all, no. Thank you so much for asking me. It was great conversation.

Steve Thomas: All right. The book is available now, and so people can pick it up at your local bookstore or place a hold at your local library. Thank you so much.

Araminta Hall: Thank you.

*****

Savannah: Hi, I’m Savannah Dorsett Jones, a librarian who works at NoveList, and I get to spend the day talking to our awesome customers, making sure our products work the way you want them to.

Clay: And I’m Clay Boyer, a cataloging librarian at NoveList and we’re here today to talk about the psychological suspense novel, Unreliable Narrator, by Araminta Hall.

Savannah: So when reading this book, the thing that I kept returning to is the whole concept of being an unreliable narrator, and the many directions you can take with that in a book. And I just wanna do a quick shout-out for the fact that unreliable narrator is a searchable appeal term within NoveList, and how that brings me such deep joy, as it’s one of my absolute favorite story voices. I’m a complete sucker for them.

Clay: Yep, that’s a good one.

Savannah: So anyway, focusing on our title here by Araminta Hall. In it, our main character, Hope, she isn’t an unreliable narrator in the way we usually mean. She’s not lying.

Clay: Right.

Savannah: She’s not delusional. But for her, it’s her reality has literally been taken from her and rewritten to benefit someone else. So I sat with that a bit, that version of unre liability, rooted in issues of class and privilege and power dynamics, and it really stuck with me, and I decided to look for other titles that explored those themes.

And so first I came to the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which was originally published in 1938. And this one was just an absolute gut instinct for me. Before I’d even finished reading the book, all of the various beats of Araminta Hall’s book, the naive young woman, the remote estate, the wealthy older man who cast a bit of a spell over her, the household that makes her feel like she doesn’t really belong. All of that in Hall’s book just had me going “Rebecca,” in my head at top volume.

Clay: It’s a great choice. Yep.

Savannah: I’ve read this book a million times over the years, and so I really love it, and just seeing those echoes of it in a new book were really cool. In Rebecca, Mrs. de Winter or, the second Mrs. de Winter, as she’s known, and the character of Hope are really cut from that sort of same cloth. They’re both poor. They’re vulnerable. They’re very self-doubting. They’re feeling completely out of their depths in this atmosphere of old family money and power, and both are being undermined by outside forces in this desperate need to protect a secret.

And also really disturbingly, in some ways their tormentors are just doing it because they can. So again, we’re getting back to that sort of power dynamic. If you haven’t read Rebecca previously, after reading Unreliable Narrator, I definitely recommend going back and looking at it. They’re really great sort of dovetails.

And I will fully acknowledge that this is a readalike that is not a new release by any means, but du Maurier is just the OG of psychological suspense. She really created the genre. So I felt like not including a classic like this was just, I don’t know, literary malpractice. I kept thinking while I was reading Unreliable Narrator and making the comparisons with Rebecca that there is no Shadowlands, which is the name of the estate in Unreliable Narrator, without Manderley, which is the mysterious estate in Rebecca.

And then moving into my second readalike, which is a much more recent title, and I chose One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole, which came out in 2024. After I’d finished reading Unreliable Narrator, as I said, Rebecca came to me as I was reading it. I was just sitting on all of these thoughts and all of these threads of power and privilege, and secrets, and the past catching up with people, and I wanted something that would push those themes further while still sticking with that unreliable narrator story construct.

So with all of that in mind, and also wanting to be intentional about picking a diverse pick, I went into NoveList and I started playing with my appeals term, combining psychological suspense, and power, and money, and secrets. And then also we have a really great tag for Own Voices, which is for books that are diverse in character and author, and I came up with One Of Us Knows.

I’d actually already read this book when it came out in 2024. So when it came up in my results and I sat and thought about the comparisons with Hall’s book, I was really pleased because the more I thought about it in this context, the more interesting all of it became. If you’re not familiar with Alyssa Cole, she started her career as a RITA award-winning romance novelist, but she’s recently switched tracks into the suspense genre, and she’s doing some really interesting things with it.

So in One Of Us Knows our main character, Ken, she arrives at a remote island estate where she’s been hired as a caretaker, and she’s trying to put her life back together. The thing is, Ken has dissociative identity disorder. She shares her mind with various alternate personalities that she doesn’t always know or trust, and she’s really honestly not sure how she ended up at this estate, which just makes the tension and the confusion even better. While she’s there, a crime happens, of course, and she really can’t be certain what she or any of those in her system, as she calls her various alters, what she may have actually seen or maybe even may have done.

And here’s why I found this a really great readalike for Hall’s book. In Unreliable Narrator and in Rebecca with Mrs. de Winter, they’re both being undermined from the outside. Ken’s unreliability is all internal. It comes from her own fractured experience and fractured mind, and that is a completely different approach to it, and I think makes you think really in another direction about what it even means to trust a narrator or trust yourself and your own perception and experiences, which is really trippy when you think about it.

Cole really does something brilliant with the way that Ken’s identity shapes her story. As a Black woman with a mental health disorder, put in the middle of a group that is largely white and male and wealthy and extremely aware of the difference in power dynamics, all of these factors come together and affect how Ken is perceived, how credible her account is to the other people around her, and just how visible her fear and, to be honest, her anger are allowed to be in any given situation.

And in my mind, that’s not just checking a box in terms of, “oh, I wanna find a diverse read.” It’s really considering how diversity of character and author and experience can really elevate a book, which is, I think, really the point of trying to find diverse books. So I liked One of Us Knows when I first read it back in 2024, and now coming back to it and comparing it with Hall’s work and really thinking about those themes of power and truth, I liked it even more.

So to sum up, “too long, didn’t read” summary of these readalikes, I would say if you’re looking for readalike options for Hall’s book, du Maurier is where you see where psychological suspense got started. And then Alyssa Cole’s One of Us Knows is where you can go for the really exciting possibilities of where psychological suspense is going. So that’s my take on things, would love to hear yours.

Clay: I’ve gotta say first off, the choice of Rebecca, excellent. Never would have occurred to me, but you’re right. Like starting the whole genre tradition back in the ’30s, a totally appropriate choice. And although I wasn’t familiar with it, One of Us Knows, in terms of the unreliable narrator trope, making the unreliable narrator someone with dissociative identity disorder, what an idea. The possibilities are just endless there, and it shows you how many different ways you can go with that particular device. Really nice.

Savannah: Thank you. I was pleased.

Clay: One of the things that struck me most about our book, Unreliable Narrator, was that the story centered around writing. Diary writing is obviously a big part of it but fiction writing in particular. The characters include both a well-known, successful author and an aspiring author and throughout, the craft of writing is discussed in great detail, including the memories and the experiences that give writers inspiration for their work. And by the way, I’ve noticed that these topics are very popular in every genre that we look at. So I was excited. I knew that there would be plenty to find.

So with those things in mind, I decided to try a search in NoveList for books with the genre psychological suspense and the subject authors, which turned up a bunch of recent books that I was already familiar with that I thought were pretty good matches. But I ended up choosing a book that I didn’t know. Now, I’ve gotta come clean and say that I hesitated to choose this book at first because there are such striking similarities in plot structure to Unreliable Narrator, and I didn’t wanna put up a book that just seemed like a do-over plot-wise, but after looking at it, I realized that both authors are different enough in their approach to make both books uniquely enjoyable.

This one is called Finders Keepers. It was written by an Australian author named Natalie Borelli, and it was just published a couple of months ago. And in it, the protagonist, Rose, she’s a young woman in New York City, and she discovers almost by accident that a very popular author has just published a very popular novel that is just about identical to a diary Rose wrote when she was a teenager but then lost when it was loaded onto a laptop that she left behind in an airport several years before the story happens. Rose knows without a doubt that this is her story. She picks up the book, and in the book, a girl in middle school writes in her diary about an obsessive crush that she has on one of the teachers there that turns into a brief affair, and this situation culminates in a terrible, violent event for which the writer feels largely responsible. Again, kinda similar to Hope Jenkins’ situation in Unreliable Narrator. And the guilt she feels compels her to keep this part of her life a secret, i.e. Rose’s Secret, which has now been revealed to much of the world. So obviously she’s freaking out. She has no idea how Emily Harper, the book’s author, came into possession of her old diary, and she’s obviously terrified that the story might be eventually connected back to her somehow. So she engages in an elaborate subterfuge to meet the author, ingratiate herself with Emily Harper under false pretenses, all in an attempt to find out exactly what she knows. It’s a really entertaining idea.

While I suspect that the similarity between this book and Unreliable Narrator is purely coincidental, I still found it pretty incredible that there are two books published within months of each other that both feature a protagonist’s darkest secrets being made public in a novel. I just thought that was really weird. And they both did different things with the storyline.

Savannah: You have to really think about it. Isn’t that one of your worst nightmares? All of your hidden secrets and fears and insecurities just being out there for the world to see. I think it makes sense that two different authors could maybe land on that because that sounds horrifying to me.

Clay: Exactly, and I think it’s also, in our media landscape now it’s not as unbelievable as it maybe used to be. Yeah, it’s a pretty terrifying idea.

Moving on to my next pick, this was a book that I actually discovered as an automatically generated recommendation on the NoveList title page for unreliable narrators. And I thought, “Hey, way to go NoveList.” I thought it was a really good choice. The book is called A Novel Obsession and it’s the debut novel by Caitlin Barasch. It published in 2022. And I think that this is a pretty interesting pick because I went off genre, which I like to do sometimes. It’s classified as psychological fiction, but it’s not a suspense novel per se. I would argue that it is suspensefully told, but the stakes are a little lower than you would find in most thrillers.

It is narrated by the character Naomi Ackerman. She’s a young New Yorker who is, again, an aspiring author. She works in a bookstore, and up until now she’s only published a few short stories. She has recently become involved in her first real committed romantic relationship with a kind, unassuming guy who one day lets slip that his ex-girlfriend also lives in New York. She’s a book editor for a trendy publisher, and she’s recently emailed him to suggest they casually get together to catch up after about a year apart. Naomi is a deeply insecure character, and of course, all of her insecurities are just instantly inflamed. And she finds a way of coping by stalking Rosemary, the ex, both on social media and in real life.

Savannah: As one does.

Clay: Sure. Just noting their similarities, their differences, watching her from afar, taking notes about what her surveillance discovers and writing. Writing, writing, writing. She eventually goes so far as befriending Rosemary, all the while convincing herself that these bizarre boundary-breaking stunts would make the perfect draft of the novel that she wants to write. It’s a little crazy. It’s a little quirky. Naomi is really overall an endearing, if somewhat imbalanced, you could even say unhinged, narrator, but she spins a darkly humorous, satirical story in which, as in unreliable narrator, one character’s privacy is invaded to provide direct inspiration for a novel. So choosing the writing tag as a pathway towards getting recommendations, I came up with these books.

Savannah: I love those suggestions, and then also with your second read, that whole idea of insecurity and not feeling like you measure up to this paragon. We see that in Araminta Hall’s book as well with the relationship Hope and Delia.

Clay: Her vulnerability is the thing that you notice about her almost first.

Savannah: Yeah. And also you see it in Rebecca too, the second Mrs. de Winter can never measure up to Rebecca. I think those are really interesting ways of looking at it.

So I think we’ve got some really great possible suggestions for readalikes, and I think that is it for today’s Circ Desk. We will check you out next time!