Thursday, September 06, 2018

Top ten false identities in fiction

Simon Lelic's new psychological thriller is The Liar's Room. One of the author's ten top false identities in fiction, as shared at the Guardian:
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

One of the great characters in fiction, Tom Ripley is charming, dapper and utterly amoral – a con artist and eventual serial killer who somehow makes you smile. In the first of the Ripley books, he assumes the identity of Dickie Greenleaf, after first battering him to death with an oar. But when the false identity catches up with him, he is obliged to kill again. Even so he finds himself trapped, until his true identity offers him a way out.
Read about another entry on the list.

The Talented Mr Ripley is on Jeff Somers's list of fifty novels that changed novels, Olivia Sudjic's list of eight favorite books about love and obsession, Roz Chast's six favorite books list, Nicholas Searle's top five list of favorite deceivers in fiction, Chris Ewan's list of the ten top chases in literature, Meave Gallagher's top twenty list of gripping page-turners every twentysomething woman should read, Sophia Bennett's top ten list of books set in the Mediterranean, Emma Straub's top ten list of holidays in fiction, E. Lockhart's list of favorite suspense novels, Sally O'Reilly's top ten list of novels inspired by Shakespeare, Walter Kirn's top six list of books on deception, Stephen May's top ten list of impostors in fiction, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Melissa Albert's list of eight books to change a villain, Koren Zailckas's list of eleven of literature's more evil characters, Alex Berenson's five best list of books about Americans abroad John Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, Tana French's top ten maverick mysteries list, the Guardian's list of the 50 best summer reads ever, the Telegraph's ultimate reading list, and Francesca Simon's top ten list of antiheroes.

--Marshal Zeringue