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Throughout my life, books have been my companions. I am social enough for the most part; I do enjoy the company of real people. But as an introverted person I have always craved deep, one-on-one connection. So when it comes to novels, a powerful and captivating first-person voice is, for me, hard to beat.

I present here a list of eight books with distinctive first-person narration that inspired me to write my own such novel. Some of these voices speak as though they are your friend, others are a bit more formal, some are hiding secrets, most tell carefully curated versions of their experiences.

All are compelling.

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Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies

"Those roles which, being neither those of hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and Opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business." 

Robertson Davies included this epigraph (a fabrication rather than an external quote) in his epistolary novel about a seemingly ordinary man, Dunstan Ramsay, who unwittingly plays a role in significant events. 

When I read this novel in my late teens, I accepted the epigraph at face value and believed Fifth Business was indeed a dramatic role and one that could represent, in fiction or real life, a person who doesn’t play a starring role. And yet I could discern, young as I was, that Davies was playing a bit with me. Dunstan Ramsay simultaneously presents himself as innocently standing apart from the action while again and again being the primary—and perhaps not so innocent—cause of the action. Many years after reading Fifth Business, as I got to work on my second novel, I knew I wanted to take on a narrative voice like this. One of the first scenes of what would eventually become I Never Said That I Was Brave was titled “Fifth Business.” I wanted to create a protagonist who sees herself existing offstage as she recounts the actions onstage. Of course this purported position, much like Dunstan Ramsay’s, should be called into question.

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Watching You Without Me, by Lynn Coady

This is literary fiction about daughters and mothers and grief and guilt and the messiness of being a human being. But it is also a dark, and at times funny, psychological thriller. Lynn Coady is such a masterful storyteller that even though we know the protagonist, Karen, is going to be okay—she speaks conversationally in the past tense with plenty of asides about how she has already shared this account with others—we are held, tautly and until the end, in suspense. Coady paces the novel in such a way that the reader figures Trevor out before Karen does, so we are pulled along wondering when she will suss him out and what she will do about it. Reading this novel is a heady trip.

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A Population of One, by Constance Beresford-Howe

This novel is a brilliant, understated study of a lonely woman, Wilhelmina Doyle, who longs for love and intimacy with a man but simultaneously fears such a relationship would spell the end of her autonomy. Wilhelmina continually compares herself to one of my favourite literary heroines of all-time, Lucy Snowe, the protagonist of Charlotte Bronte’s Villete. Wilhelmina, a teacher—and spinster—like Lucy, describes herself as “a Victorian heroine absurdly planted in the twentieth century.”

And, like Lucy, Wilhelmina has a powerful narrative voice that describes the experience of being not only an outsider in her own life, but a woman filled with a desire she is not free to express, except in fleeting moments. This one packs a hefty emotional punch.

*

Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O’Neill

The power of this novel is its disarming narrator, a 13-year-old girl named Baby. She is without guile or judgment or self pity. Her mother is dead, her father and his friends are junkies and small-time criminals and none of this is presented as sad or problematic. It’s simply Baby’s life. And we are granted the privilege of witnessing it. Heather O’Neill is so in command that she makes what could be maudlin and incomprehensible both funny and relatable.

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Girl Runner, by Carrie Snyder

This novel tells the story of the fictional 1928 Olympic gold medalist Aganetha Smart. She was a trailblazer (her Olympic victory came in the first year that women were allowed to compete in track) but when the novel opens, she is 104 years old and living in a nursing home, her past glories lost to time. Her voice is cantankerous and tender, meandering and sharp and her life remains incomplete until she tells it. Snyder unspools the many threads of her complex story so deftly I gasped when Aganetha’s full accounting was finally revealed. 

* 

A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence

I have long been fascinated by how Margaret Laurence chose to tell the story of Rachel Cameron, the 34-year-old spinster teacher with an outwardly dull, ordinary life, and how effective this method proved. Laurence uses the first-person present tense. It’s a limited perspective. There is no later wisdom or experience contextualizing the narrative, no other perspective pushing in. Rachel is here, trapped: in her small town; in her overbearing mother’s house; and within the circumstances of her time and place on Earth (when, for example, “sensible women” don’t have extramarital sex). Because of Laurence’s choice of voice and tense, we are on Rachel’s journey with her in—as the kids say nowadays—real time, where we can recognize how riveting and extraordinary her life is.

* 

A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews

The coming-of-age story of Nomi Nickel, a wry, sort of rebellious, certainly outspoken girl living in a repressive conservative Mennonite community manages to be achingly sad, shocking and funny all at the same time. Miriam Toews weaves the story slowly as Nomi—in a roundabout way—finally reveals the full story of her mother’s leaving and the price Nomi, and those who love her, must pay for personal freedom.

* 

The Elizabeth Stories, by Isabel Huggan

These eight, interconnected stories of the adolescent Elizabeth are unsentimental and beautifully untidy. Elizabeth is awkward. The characters are not only imperfect, their heroes are imperfect. And the children, innocent in their desire for pleasure, don’t shy away from their sexual impulses because Isabel Huggan doesn’t shy away from adolescent sexual desire or any difficult issue about growing up in a patriarchal world. This is a deeply layered collection written by a fearless and uncompromising storyteller, one who quietly offers commentary about, among other things, the power dynamics between men and women and the roles women are expected to play within these dynamics.

 "Don't greet so hard," I whispered, and tried to push him away a little bit. All the warm feelings I'd been having were dissipated with the discomfort of being pressed down so heavily. But he wouldn't stop, he kept moving rhythmically of top of me, saying, "Shut up, Elizabeth, shut up."

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Learn more about I Never Said I Was Brave: 

A taut tale of female friendship and betrayal.

Set between the 1970s and 2010, I Never Said That I Was Brave examines the complicated relationship between two women as they navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’. Motivated by guilt and confusion, the unnamed narrator recounts the shifting dynamics of her lifelong friendship with Miriam, a charismatic astrophysicist who focuses on dark matter. As childhood immigrants to Canada from Uganda, the girls are able to assimilate (though not always easily). In adulthood, they chafe against the deeply held traditions and expectations of their South Asian community and their own internalized beliefs about women.

As the narrator follows her memories on their unpredictable and unreliable paths, the reader is taken along on a devastating journey, one which blurs distinctions between right and wrong, victim and manipulator, life and death.