Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963. At 18, as a University of Mississippi student, she was admitted by the writer Barry Hannah into his graduate course on the short story. In 1982 she transferred to Bennington College, where she studied classics and overlapped with the future novelists Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem.

She has published three novels in about thirty years, spending roughly a decade on each. The Secret History (1992) draws on her Bennington years: it is an inverted detective story narrated by Richard Papen, one of six classics students at a small Vermont college, looking back on how the group came to murder their friend Bunny. The Little Friend (2002), set in early-1970s Mississippi, follows a girl whose nine-year-old brother was found hanged years earlier; it won the WH Smith Literary Award and was first published in Dutch, because her books sold more per capita in the Netherlands than anywhere else. The Goldfinch (2013) follows Theo Decker, 13, who survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother and leaves him with Carel Fabritius's painting The Goldfinch. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was filmed in 2019.

Start with The Secret History. Because the book reveals the killing at the start, it runs on why rather than who, and it is the most direct entry into her style: a closed circle of characters, a crime that cannot be undone, and its long aftermath.

Read The Goldfinch second. It is broader, following Theo from age 13 through New York, Las Vegas and beyond, and it is the book that won her the Pulitzer. Leave The Little Friend for last. Its main subject is less the unexplained death at its center than Harriet's extended family and Southern life, so it suits readers who already know they like her patience with detail.