About the author
Donna Tartt is an American novelist known for publishing long, densely constructed books at wide intervals. Her work combines psychological intensity, crime, friendship, objects, and narrators whose taste and self-knowledge are not reliable guides to their actions.
The Secret History, her first novel, reveals a murder before reconstructing the intellectual and social world that made it possible. Its influence on campus and dark-academia fiction comes from making beauty and privilege part of the mechanism of guilt.
Where to start
Start with The Secret History for a classical-college murder story, then read The Goldfinch for a larger novel organised around grief, crime, and a stolen painting.
