From Dante’s Inferno to We Need to Talk About Kevin, guilt comes in many varieties, and drives innumerable plots. Here are some of the best

Guilt cowers red-faced at the edge of the party, wringing its hands. Enter the novelist who desires nothing more than to dance with it all night long. Guilt may be a curse, but it’s the kind of curse that fires a narrative.



Fictional guilt is as tenacious as Dante’s demons, as indelible as Duncan’s blood. It manifests itself in spectres and tormented dreams, driving the afflicted to seek its erasure via the confessional, the bottle or the noose.



Lipstick on a collar, a reappearing bloodstain – the physical evidence of a guilty act has turned many a plot. Moreover, the notion of the mark of Cain, the telltale stamp of culpability, is a persistent one. In my own novel, Siren, Róisín searches herself repeatedly for any trace of what she’s done and is taken aback to find no apparent sign at all. When she looks for remorse, or even awareness, in the eyes of her nemesis Lonergan, she sees only denial.



The key element in all fiction is conflict, and guilt is a battlefield. Inherent to its intractable nature is the struggle to hide, to overcome, to expiate.



The settings of these books range from hell to New Jersey, from Belfast to the Tigris. Survivor, collective, successor, sexual, Jewish, Catholic, post-colonial, existential, repressed, suppressed, sublimated: when it comes to guilt, there’s a variety for everyone.

1. Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Dante’s Inferno is a lawyer’s Paradiso, with every imaginable sin codified in nine degrees of culpability. The damned are assigned according to their predominant sin, so that a traitor with a sideline in lust will fare much worse than a moderately treacherous lech. As for remorse, the denizens of hell are beyond all that. Even Francesca, high up in the second circle, regrets her current circumstances, but not the adultery that put her there.

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Raskolnikov considers the guilt that wracks him to be a form of weakness. Would a superman like Napoleon torture himself over such a paltry act as the murder of a pawnbroker and her sister? In attempting to evade his guilt, he succeeds only in shunting it off into his unconscious, where it surfaces in the dreamtime visitations of Alonya’s taunting ghost. The wily detective Porfiry warns him that the law of nature dictates that he will either be driven mad or obliged to confess. And so it turns out.

3. Beloved by Toni Morrison

Sethe, a former slave who attempted to kill her children rather than subject them to the tortures she herself endured, succeeded in killing only one, whose grave she marked “Beloved”. The simple guilt occasioned by this act is compounded by a complex guilt born from the trauma of victimhood and slavery. The strange young woman who materialises years later, and calls herself Beloved, is as voracious as guilt itself when it comes to consuming Sethe’s love and bounty. She grows in size along with the strength of Sethe’s remorse. “If the hen had only two eggs, she got both.”

4. The Twelve by Stuart Neville

Former IRA man Gerry Fegan is spurred to vengeance by spectres of his own. Haunted by the past, he is preyed upon by “followers” (the US title, Ghosts of Belfast, gets to the essence of the book). There is no rest for Fegan, no respite from the ghosts of his screaming victims. His guilt made manifest in these ghostly followers, he is compelled to turn on those who sent him out to do the killing, to quiet the voices in his head.

5. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Another war, another perpetrator. This time, the violence is state-sanctioned. This gloriously poetic, brutal novel by an Iraq war veteran is suffused with American protagonist John Bartle’s guilt – for fighting, for surviving, for the death of a beloved comrade he had vowed to protect. The disconnect between the US public and its servicemen is dramatised in Bartle’s encounter, on his return, with a civilian who tries to buy him a congratulatory drink.

6. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

The 1969 novel that scandalised readers with its descriptions of a young Jewish man’s onanistic habits, and made Roth a bestseller. Portnoy is “sick to the gills from rolling through these heavy seas of guilt” and throbs with desire for guiltless shikses in a world of crumpled Kleenex, slabs of liver and inherited angst. “The guilt, the fears – the terror bred into my bones!” Framed as a monologue to his psychoanalyst, this is guilt unzipped, with a memorable protagonist who is still outrageous today.

7. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

In the Irish Catholic variety, guilt shades into lacerating shame. This is guilt made flesh, its language broken down into fragments of raw and almost unspeakable emotion. Edna O’Brien, with her “long iceberg of guilt” is the mother of Irish female guilt fiction, but where O’Brien dips an elegant toe, McBride dives right in. Annie Ryan’s stage version, with Aoife Duffin in the solo role, is every bit as powerful as the book.

8. Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink

Schlink is best known for The Reader, and the ensuing controversy as to whether he lets Hanna, the former SS guard, off the hook by making her illiterate. In this later-published collection of six essays, the author (also a renowned jurist and law professor) addresses more directly the question of Germany’s relationship with its Nazi past, and the philosophy of collective guilt.

9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

If Eve is guilty (and isn’t she always?) then an Eva who gives birth to a Kevin is guiltier still. “Don’t let them saddle you with all that killing,” another mother tells her, and indeed Eva is scrupulous about how far she is willing to assume responsibility for the actions of a mass murderer. A fictional counterpart to the recently published memoir of Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine killers, Eva’s guilt is really a kind of regret for having proceeded with a pregnancy she never wanted.

10. Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

Vic Van Allen is no Raskolnikov; he is as free from remorse as any Napoleon. “The guilt didn’t come.” Highsmith insinuates us into the point of view of the killer and implicates us in his actions. We are right in there with long-suffering, cuckolded Vic, with the copulating snails and all the rest of it. His move into violence is so seamless, so much of a piece with what has gone before, that when he holds his wife’s lover under the water and keeps him there, it seems the reasonable thing to do. Guilty Vic. Guilty us.