What exactly is an anti-hero? While the term, which dates back to the early 18th century, has always been quite loosely defined, it is often used to describe protagonists who defy conventional heroic traits, such as courage, integrity or compassion. Instead, antiheroes are often deeply flawed characters, with questionable values, a skewed moral compass and an unreliable point of view. Although they’re not without their attractions.

One notable example is the villainous Joker from DC comics. With the release of Joker: Folie à Deux this month on the big screen, the Clown Prince of Crime’s dark and sadistic side takes centre stage, while his inner demons and struggles with mental illness elicit sympathy from audiences.

If the thrill of Joker has left you craving more, we’ve rounded up more morally ambiguous characters from Booker Prize-nominated novels below.

Sadie Smith in Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Creation Lake follows Sadie Smith, a slick American undercover agent sent to rural France to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists. As a cunning and manipulative protagonist, Sadie wields her charm to get what she wants, often with little regard for others. Employed by a morally questionable company with unclear intentions, her status as an anti-hero is cemented through her powers of seduction and constant double-dealing. Kushner creates a character whose motivations remain elusive, leaving readers uncertain as to which side she’s actually on. ‘The biggest drama, though, is Sadie herself,’ wrote the Guardian. ‘From the off, there are hints that – surprise – spies don’t tell the full story.’

Mahmood Mattan from The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, The Fortune Men is based on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged at Cardiff Prison in Wales in the 1950s. A smooth-talking, petty criminal, wrongly accused of murder, Mattan was well-dressed, could speak five languages and was considered to be a romantic at heart. He is ‘a man I slowly began to fall in complicated love with’, author Nadifa Mohamed previously told Penguin Books. ‘I found him first of all in the spiky words he left in the official archives, his bitter jokes and radical independence jotted down by men who were plotting his judicial murder, then in the reminisces of the people who had loved him, fought him, fought for him,’ she added. Described in the novel as a proud man with a love for the sea, Mattan holds a steadfast belief in the British justice system, which is ultimately his downfall. 

Me in The Sellout by Paul Beatty 

In the fictional farming town of Dickens, California, the narrator – referred to as both ‘Me’ and ‘Bonbon’ – reflects on his childhood after he finds himself on trial in the Supreme Court for attempting to reinstate racial segregation and slavery – all in contemporary America. Me grew up reading Freud and Jung and is described as unassuming and sensitive. But after an isolated youth, during which he was subjected to his father’s race-centric social experiments, Me becomes an awkward young man. 

His father is then murdered by the police, and as a result, Me struggles to find meaning in his life. So when Dickens is removed from the map of California, he is determined to bring it back, albeit through a series of deluded actions. Paul Beatty’s satirical, 2016 Booker Prize-winning novel takes racial stereotypes and attitudes and injects them with absurdism and irony. 

Henry Perowne in Saturday by Ian McEwan

At the heart of McEwan’s 2005 Booker Prize-longlisted novel Saturday is successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who is married with a beautiful wife and two talented children. Set in London, during an anti-war demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the novel follows Perowne through the tumultuous events of a single day in his life. ‘He experiences vague, unattributable feelings of shame and guilt,’ notes The Globe and Mail, in a review of the novel titled ‘Saturday’s anti-hero’. ‘Though he’s a loving father and husband, he feels that his work has made him “incapable of pity,”’ it concludes. While Perowne has outwardly achieved success and lives a seemingly content upper-middle-class life, he is revealed to be a man confused by his own fragility and damaged by an existential quest for meaning. 

Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

Frances ‘Francie’ Brady is the protagonist of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, a 12-year-old schoolboy whose behaviour becomes increasingly concerning as he begins bullying a new student. Growing up in an abusive environment with an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother, Brady finds himself riddled with anger, justifying his actions through a series of delusions. In a stream of conscious narrative, McCabe infuses dark humour into this bleak novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992. Cruel and clearly disturbed, Francie becomes more and more violent as The Butcher Boy progresses, and he begins displaying psychopathic tendencies. Readers of the novel have described Francie as ‘a twisted Huckleberry Finn’ descending into madness and despair.

Dorrigo Evans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Winner of the 2014 Booker Prize, The Narrow Road to the Deep North focuses on Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor and war veteran. Evans is lauded for his actions as an army surgeon and POW in charge of 700 men, yet he’s wracked with guilt and a pervading sense of failure after an affair with his uncle’s wife. Lonely and unsatisfied, and haunted by his war experiences, Evans increasingly believes his life is meaningless. In a non-linear narrative, Richard Flanagan shifts between decades, while the story hinges on the horrors of the Burma Death Railway, where one in every three workers died during its construction.

Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Winner of the 2009 Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has become a modern classic which reinvigorated the historical fiction genre. Set in England in the 1520s, the novel follows Thomas Cromwell, who served as Henry VIII’s most trusted advisor. Cromwell is charming yet ruthless, the son of a blacksmith turned political genius. Described by Henry himself as being as ‘cunning as a bag of serpents,’ Cromwell is endlessly resourceful but cold and calculating, as he helps the king divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Mantel’s depiction of the complex, cut-throat world of the Tudors, and her decision to spotlight a historical figure who previously only existed in the shadows, saw her become the first woman to win the Booker twice and the first person to win for two novels in a trilogy. 

Narrator in Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

Written from the perspective of an unnamed – and deeply unreliable – female narrator, this Booker Prize 2023 shortlisted novel details the bizarre events that occur in the ‘remote northern country’ to which the narrator has newly relocated. Tasked with taking care of her brother after his wife leaves him, Bernstein’s apparently subservient protagonist becomes increasingly isolated in the mysterious locale; a country where she doesn’t speak the language and where she is immediately treated as an outcast by the locals. As she reflects on sacrificing her own desires in favour of a dutiful life looking after her family, questions about her true intentions slowly emerge via a series of creepy events, including the death of livestock and crop failure. The reader is left asking: is she an innocent victim, or a malevolent presence? 

Eileen in Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2016 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Eileen, a lonely and unstable young woman strikes up a friendship that soon alters the course of her life. Eileen Dunlop works at a juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys and lives with her abusive, alcoholic father. Uncomfortable in her own skin, she suffers from body dysmorphia, a consequence of her traumatic childhood, and her head is full of disturbing thoughts. Eileen desires connection with a glamorous new work colleague, but events take a sinister turn when she is implicated in a chilling crime. Pitiable yet simultaneously unlikable, Eileen, as noted by the Guardian, elicits both sympathy and revulsion in the reader: ‘She has a hardness, a sort of mild sociopathy that allows her to hurt someone and use their prone body to pull herself into freedom and safety.’

Sue Trinder in Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

In Sarah Waters’ Victorian-era Fingersmith, Sue Trinder, an orphan raised by Mrs Sucksby in a den of thieves, becomes entangled in a scheme to deceive a wealthy heiress. Raised as a ‘fingersmith’, an artful dodger in a dark underworld, Trinder must trick Maud Lilly into eloping with a conman, but plans begin to go awry as she finds herself unexpectedly growing closer to Lilly, and begins to question her alliances.  Described as a female, sexually aware Oliver Twist by the New York Times, Fingersmith is a tale of intrigue, deception and unexpected secrets, and was shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize.

Tambu in This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, This Mournable Body focuses on the inequalities and injustices that Tambudzai Sigauke (Tambu) faces living amongst unrest and corruption in Harare in the late 1990s. Hailing from a small Zimbabwean village, Tambu is determined to escape her troubled background, but after gaining access to a middle-class education, she still finds herself struggling, descending into poverty after leaving an unsatisfying job where she faced gender and racial discrimination. Uncertain of her identity and full of self-loathing, Tambu experiences a series of events which further shake her confidence. ‘Dangarembga gives us something rare’ the Washington Post wrote – ‘a sparkling antiheroine we find ourselves rooting for’.