A grudge is usually characterised as an unreasonable holding on to some wrong, long after the customs of courtesy would allow it. In the popular imagination, the grudge holder is a comical figure, absurd if not maligned, eventually relegated to the periphery of society because of their unwillingness to forgive and forget.

But as I started to think about the grudge holders in these books, it became clear that these characters are serious and, accordingly, their grudges ought to be treated seriously. Because what is a grudge but a refusal to go along with social niceties for the comfort of others, to maintain the peace of the status quo? The grudge has a politics of its own.

The difference between, say, righteous anger and a grudge is duration: righteous anger resolves itself in forgiveness or revenge but the grudge lingers. The grudge holder keeps and foregrounds their discomfort, other people’s dismissal of which marks a kind of social violence. They insist on making the wrongs against them visible, in sitting with the difficulty; and in many cases, the wrongs committed against these characters are those arising from unequal and disabling social systems.

In my second novel, Study for Obedience, I wanted to explore the way the personal and the historical converge in the grudge, how grudges can run crosswise, conflict with those of others and what happens when all these factors rub up against one another.

The grudge holder’s ongoing refusal to forgive, the insistence on the unforgivable nature of the wrong committed, amount in these books to a refusal to accept the condition of the world as it is – a refusal that is the basic precondition for a new and changed world.

1. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays are replete with grudge holders and Shylock is the greatest. In the play, Bassanio, a young Venetian noble, borrows money from the Jewish moneylender Shylock and names his friend Antonio as guarantor. Antonio, incidentally, has spent his days antagonising Shylock with antisemitic abuse, so when Bassanio cannot pay back his debt, Shylock directs him to the terms of their agreement, which stipulate a pound of Antonio’s flesh in case of non-payment. When asked what good that would do him, he responds, “To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.”

2. Lote by Shola von Reinhold
Lote’s protagonist Mathilda bears a grudge against institutions, including but not limited to the academic and literary establishments that erect canons via a process of exclusion and suppression. In the novel, Mathilda searches for traces of one of her “Transfixions”, Hermia Druitt, a forgotten Black modernist poet whose writings have mysteriously disappeared. Mathilda is a fabulous (and fabulously dressed) refusalist, as we learn when we follow her to an artist’s residency in a place called Dun, rejecting the stringent asceticism of the residency’s organisers while making use of the opportunity to pursue her own interests.

3. Yes, I Am a Destroyer by Mira Mattar
The narrator of this dazzling short novel is a tutor whose fragmented monologue wheels between desire and rage, vengefulness and devotion. Her use of language reflects the kind of chaotic resistance she works out in her every day: she refuses, while obsessively returning to, the degraded and humiliating conditions of contemporary life.

4. The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
Ravn’s novel is set on the Six-Thousand Ship, which is orbiting a faraway planet New Discovery, where the crew has discovered a number of strange objects. The book is structured around a series of recorded statements, of varied degrees of redaction and fullness, made by the ship’s human and humanoid crew to some kind of committee about the effects of these objects upon themselves. The objects have the effect of defamiliarising the workplace for the crew, making them see it anew, making them realise their lives might have meaning beyond work. Over the course of the book, their resentment against their employers grows and grows.

5. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, trans. Morgan Giles
This novel’s grudge holder, Kazu, a ghost who haunts the vicinity of Tokyo Ueno station, expresses little of the rage of the previous grudge holders explored here. Instead, his grudge is expressed in his persistence: he carries on haunting the station, an ongoing reminder of the sharp contrast of his own life as a labourer and that of Japan’s upper classes. Kazu’s history runs parallel, in the novel, to that of Emperor Akihito, who was born in the same year, whose son was born on the same day as his own, but whose trajectory is clearly quite different from Kazu’s, who ends up living and dying outside the station.

6. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
In Tokarczuk’s 2009 mystery novel set in a rural village, a number of hunters and fur farmers go missing or turn up murdered. The protagonist, Janina, no fan of hunters herself, comes to believe that the local wildlife is responsible for the killings and shares her theory with the police commandant, who dismisses her. I’ll stop there to avoid spoiling the ending …

7. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
While not the sole focus of the story, ghosts abound in Ward’s novel, as alive as the living. They appear to the central characters including Jojo, the son of the family at the centre of the book, and they even narrate their own stories. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, the ghosts represent a spectral reappearance of the violent history of the US, and their presence alongside the living suggests the continuing legacies of enslavement.

8. Extinction by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McClintock
The narrator of Bernhard’s last novel is Franz-Josef Murau, the estranged son of an Austrian landowning family, living in self-exile in Rome. In his characteristically compulsive, unending sentences, Bernhard’s spiral-like narrative uses repetition to return and return to a single point: Murau’s refusal to absolve his family (or himself) of their complicity in one of the great atrocities of the 20th century.

9. SS Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy, trans. Alastair McEwen
The narrator of Jaeggy’s slim novel recollects, on the occasion of his cremation, a cruise she took as a teenager with her father. Although she insists on her distance from him – he is “a stranger to [her]”, a certain “insomniac resentment” of him (and his wealthy friends and family who demonstrate contempt for her) becomes apparent in her narration. “I do not thank you,” she says to herself, at a dinner party at the house of some her father’s “fine friends”.

10. Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
Silko’s collection of poetry, prose, Laguna Pueblo folktales and photographs is expansive and generous in its approach to form and subject matter. The temporality of the pieces is synchronous, so that past, present and future coexist – the past, crucially, lives in the present. One of the recurring themes explored in these stories is the persistence of the violent colonial past in the still-violent present, and the titular short story follows a young Inuit woman whose quest for revenge is both personal and historical.

• Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is published by Granta. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.