» Update your details

• Extract
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Product details

• Biography
• More titles by Donna Tartt

Synopsis

Truly deserving of the accolade modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement – both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an élite 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 …

Reviews

Customer Review: 11 September 2002

Reviewer: A reader from Leek, England

The Secret History is one of the best books I have ever read. I first read it back in 1994 and since then have re-read it countless times. It's incredibly well written. The novel is beautiful, moving, chilling, thoughtful and at times funny. Perhaps the best thing about The Secret History is the characterisation, by the end of the novel I completely believed in the characters and wished I could have been one. An excellent novel, I haven't read anything as good since.

Critic Review:

The Secret History tells the story of a group of classics students at an élite American college, who are cerebral, obsessive and finally murderous ... it is a haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction.
The Times

Excellent ...Donna Tartt has discovered not the usual collegiate mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a heart of darkness as stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed ...she keeps the pace fast and the tension taught ...A thinking person's thriller.
Newsday

As a profoundly serious examination of remorse and its effects ... this book is as moving as it is insightful. As a murder mystery it is one of the best I have ever read. But as a first novel it takes my breath away, it is so accomplished.
Ruth Rendell

Enthralling . . . Imagine the plot of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment crossed with the story of Euripides' Bacchae set against the backdrop of Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction and told in the elegant ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited ... forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled ... ferociously well-paced ...remarkably powerful novel .
The New York Times

Tartt's erudition sprinkles the text like sequins ... Brilliant.
Sunday Times

Product details

Shipped within 24hrs.
FREE UK Delivery*

• Full delivery details

• » View your basket