The Secret History
Donna Tartt, 1992
★ 4.14 from 1.1m ratings on Goodreads
Mystery, thriller & crime Literary fiction
A California scholarship boy is taken up by a circle of Greek students at an elite Vermont college — and by the thing they have done. A novel about beauty, envy and the cost of belonging. A warm, witty voice carries you through a slow-building mood of melancholy and dread, with memory and envy close beneath.
Feels like melancholy, dread and wonder. About love, identity and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy campus novels with lush prose, uneasy friendships and a narrator who looks back on a charmed, damaged circle. Be warned that some readers find the pacing slow and the characters pretentious and hard to like.
Why read it
It offers a tense, literate look at beauty, envy and the cost of belonging, and its lingering unease stays with you after the last page.
A page from the book
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. What readers say
Readers are split: many find the book mesmerizing, atmospheric, and hard to put down, praising its lush writing and tense mood; others are bored or irritated by slow pacing and unlikeable, pretentious characters. It leaves a lingering, unsettling impression.
Donna Tartt.Tartt began The Secret History as an undergraduate at Bennington, where classmates read it in draft for years; it was published in 1992, when she was twenty-eight.
Books that feel like this
East of Eden
John Steinbeck, 1952
Two generations of a California family, a retelling of Cain and Abel, and one Hebrew word that means 'thou mayest.'
More by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt, 2013
A boy walks out of a museum bombing with a small Dutch painting, and it quietly shapes the next thirty years of his life.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Secret History for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy campus novels with lush prose, uneasy friendships and a narrator who looks back on a charmed, damaged circle. Be warned that some readers find the pacing slow and the characters pretentious and hard to like.
- What is The Secret History like?
- A warm, witty voice carries you through a slow-building mood of melancholy and dread, with memory and envy close beneath. Feels like melancholy, dread and wonder. About love, identity and memory.
- What should I read after The Secret History?
- If you liked The Secret History, try East of Eden (John Steinbeck), The Street Lawyer (John Grisham) and You (Caroline Kepnes).
A taste of the feed
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Why finishing a book feels like a breakup.
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What it costs to answer no questions when the charge is murder.
The following day, she lay in bed in a private room at the hospital. The police questioned her in the presence of her lawyer. Alicia remained silent throughout the interview. Her lips were pale, bloodless; they fluttered occasionally but formed no words, made no sounds. She answered no questions. She could not, would not, speak. Nor did she speak when charged with Gabriel’s murder. She remained silent when she was placed under arrest, refusing to deny her guilt or confess it.
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