Over the last several years we have been encountering some rather unreliable narrators in novels. "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins featured the most notable one so far. Fiona Barton gave us another one in "The Widow." And now Camilla Way is tantalizing readers with dueling unreliable narrators in her tense psychological thriller "Watching Edie."
Edie is one of those two narrators. She is describing her experiences in the present day. Her chapters alternate with those being told from the point of view of her former best friend from the past. As we experience each woman's viewpoint we start to get uneasy feelings that perhaps what we are reading isn't a trustworthy depiction of what has really happened or of what is likely to occur. And that is the beauty of all these unreliable narrators; in the best tradition of mystery novels their points of view are designed to confuse us, throw us off course, and ultimately, entertain us.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that all these books I'm citing were written by women from the United Kingdom. But I don't think so. After you listen to this interview with Camilla Way please scroll back through our interview archive and check out the interviews we have in there with Fiona Barton and Paula Hawkins, too. You'll be hitting the unreliable narrator trifecta when you do that!
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