Secret History

Notes From Your Bookseller

A classic among the dark academia genre, The Secret History is a captivating thriller about a group of college students who slowly lose their morality as they search to transcend the triviality of their own lives. Tartt’s writing is lyrically haunting and as our unreliable narrator leads us through the disturbing events leading up to a murder, we find that these disillusioned college students believe that anything is justifiable, even the most horrific of acts.

A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK ? INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ? A contemporary literary classic and “an accomplished psychological thriller … absolutely chilling” (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment…. Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” –The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment…. Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” –The New York Times

“An accomplished psychological thriller …. Absolutely chilling …. Tartt has a stunning command of the lyrical.” –The Village Voice

“Beautifully written, suspenseful from start to finish.” –Vogue

“A huge, mesmerizing, galloping read, pleasurably devoured …. Gorgeously written, relentlessly erudite.” –Vanity Fair

“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

“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)
– From the Publisher

Powerful . . . Enthralling . . . A ferociously well-paced entertainment.
– New York Times