The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
🏆 Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Tartt’s third, sprawling novel is a coming-of-age story that centres on a grieving boy’s obsession with a famous painting, saved from destruction during a terrorist attack and never returned. It was adapted into a 2016 film directed by John Crowley.
Recommendations from our site
Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch (2013), is the most obvious go-to read for those who have just discovered The Secret History. The novel centres on Theodore Decker, a thirteen-year-old boy from New York whose life is forever changed after he survives a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother. As he stumbles through the debris he happens upon a small painting, which he takes with him—this painting being by none other than Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. (This perfectly formed little artwork has found its popularity “hugely enhanced” in the wake of the book’s publication, The Guardian reports—200,000 queued to see it when it was exhibited at the Frick Collection in 2014.)
This coming-of-age novel follows Theo throughout his life observing the effects of that fateful day, transporting us to art’s seedy underworld. Like The Secret History, this book is a literary novel full of mystery, grief, and suspense.
From our article Books like The Secret History
And – briefly – one more, if you’ll allow me: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which won her a Pulitzer, is another mammoth contemporary novel I can personally recommend. It’s a sensational, sprawling book, in the Dickensian mould: full of rough diamonds, drama and terrible hardships. It’s well worth your time.
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