Life can be cruel, especially when you’re forced to listen to your mother plotting to kill your father in union with her lover, his brother, before you’re even born.

That’s the wickedly entertaining set-up in Atonement author Ian McEwan’s latest novella, the dastardly Nutshell.

Upside down in his mother’s womb, this particularly prescient foetus first becomes aware of the Machiavellian scheme during his mother Trudy’s post-coitous conversation with the dim-witted Claude, complaining about her estranged husband, poet and publisher John.

“Outside these warm, living walls an icy tale slides towards its hideous conclusion. The midsummer clouds are thick, there’s no moon, not the faintest breeze. But my mother and uncle are talking up a winter storm.”

If those names seem familiar, McEwan playfully nods towards Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the Prince of Denmark is prodded to kill his Uncle Claudius in revenge for the assassination of his father, the king. Meanwhile, a remorseless Claudius seizes the throne for himself, marrying the king’s widow, Gertrude.

Something of a thriller, Nutshell’s macabre plot escalates quickly, wrapped in Hitchcockian suspense exacerbated by the fact the unborn child cannot see directly, but is instead left to piece together half-heard clues and translate emotional tremors felt through Trudy’s pregnant body.

Wanting to save his father or, worst case, avenge him, the unborn child’s loathing for Claude is intense, but his feelings for Trudy are much more conflicted.

After all, he’s very much a part of and dependent on her, connected by the umbilical chord he uses as worry beads.

Surprisingly smart, given he hasn’t set foot in the world as yet, our ears from the womb receives a lot of his world knowledge from the podcasts his mother plays when she cannot sleep.

Packed with killer lines like, “Not everyone knows what it’s like to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose,” there’s a twisted humour to his indignity that makes Nutshell a guilty pleasure and adds a sharp new voice to the list of narrative oddities.

Here are five more unusual literary narrators: 

The Lovely Bones

Ever read a murder mystery in which the narrator was the murder victim? That’s the set-up of Alice Sebold’s second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Lovely Bones, narrated by Susie Salmon, a teenager who is brutally raped and killed.

Filth

Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh also kicks off his fifth novel Filth with a murder, investigated by the thoroughly reprehensible, racist, violent, misogynistic, coke-addicted and alcoholic detective sergeant Bruce Robertson, played by James McAvoy in the film adaptation. While he’s our first-person narrator for the most part, he’s grotesquely assisted in this role by a tapeworm inside his stomach.

War Horse

Michael Morpurgo’s young adult novel War Horse is narrated from the perspective of Joey, a farm steed who’s sent to the front line during the First World War. A brave spirit, it’s surprising just how attached you become to this unsentimental animal who tells the horrors of war like it is.

Shakespeare’s Dog

Mr. Hooker is, literally, Will Shakespeare and wife Anne Hathaway’s dog in Leon Rooke’s extremely funny but also quite bittersweet book that sees our faithful hound getting pretty wordy himself in a rapscallion way.

Apples

Irvine Welsh called Richard Millward’s debut novel and highly original teenage council estate romance Apples, written when he was only 19, “one of the best books I’ve ever read about being young, working-class and British”. It has chapters narrated by a butterfly and a lamppost.