Awards

• Runner-up for The BBC Big Read Top 100 2003
• Runner-up for The BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.
• Short-listed for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003
• Shortlisted for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.

Overview

The dark academia bestseller that defined an age Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - incredibly compelling, dramatic and playful. Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

Full Product Details

9780140167771

Table of Contents

Reviews

A haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction The Times So irresistible and seductive it's almost a guilty pleasure Guardian Donna Tartt is an amazingly good writer. She's dense, she's allusive. She's a gorgeous storyteller -- Stephen King Takes my breath away -- Ruth Rendell Brilliant and compulsive Evening Standard A huge, mesmerizing, galloping read Vanity Fair A page-turner in the true sense Independent Brilliant Sunday Times

The Secret History succeeds magnificently. . . . A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment. . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled. --The New York Times <br> An accomplished psychological thriller. . . . Absolutely chilling. . . . Tartt has a stunning command of the lyrical. -- The Village Voice <br> Beautifully written, suspenseful from start to finish. -- Vogue <br> A haunting, compelling, and brilliant piece of fiction. . . . Packed with literary allusion and told with a sophistication and texture that owes much more to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth. -- The Times (London) <br> Her writing bewitches us. . . . The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin. -- The Philadephia Inquirer <br> Enthralling. . . . A remarkably powerful novel.

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them - and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder - and might never have been if one of the gang - a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran - hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel - Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion. First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids - while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's - and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal - and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie. (Kirkus Reviews)

A thriller in the Daphne du Maurier vein, Tartt's debut novel charts the death of innocence among a group of over-privileged New England students. The narrator, Richard Papen, is easily seduced by the snobberies of the classics school at Hampden College, Vermont but - vainly - tries to hold firm against debauchery and murder. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available