A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and determined to avoid being taken in by the city as an orphan, Theo scrambles between nights in friends’ apartments and on the city streets. He becomes entranced by the one thing that reminds him of his mother, a small, mysteriously captivating painting that soon draws Theo into the art underworld

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss

The Secret History tells the story of a group of classics students at an elite American college, who are cerebral, obsessive and finally murderous… it is a haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction' The Times Tartt's erudition sprinkles the text like sequins, but she's such an adept writer that she's able to make the occasional swerve into Greek legends and semantics seem absolutely crucial to the examination of contemporary society which this book undoubtedly and seriously is, for all the fun it provides on the way… Brilliant' Sunday Times 'A highly readable murder mystery; a romantic dream of doomed youth and a disquisition on ancient and modern mores… Tartt shows an impressive ability to pace and pattern her novel' Independent 'A huge, mesmerizing, galloping read, pleasurably devoured… gorgeously written, relentlessly erudite' Vanity Fair The skill with which Tartt manipulates our sympathies and anticipations is… remarkable… A marvellous debut' Spectator 'Implicates the reader in a conspiracy which begins in bucolic enchantment and ends exactly where it must… a mesmerizing and powerful novel' Jay Mclnerney 'A compelling read… this very young novelist has the arrogant boldness to tell us that it is in abstract, arcane scholarship and mandarin addictions that utter violence can flourish' George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement 'Mesmerizing and perverse' Elaine Showalter, The Times Literary Supplement 'Brilliant… a study of young arrogance, a thriller, a comedy of campus manners, and an oblique Greek primer. It is a well written and compulsive read' Evening Standard