She was born in 1963 and attended the University of Mississippi from where she transferred to Bennington College in Vermont.

Tartt's classmates at Bennington College included the writers Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt. It was Ellis who introduced Tartt to his agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban; and it was Urban who started a bidding war for The Secret History that scored Tartt a reported $450,000 advance.

After History's success, she bought a 120-acre plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia with an original 1820s farmhouse to get away from the summer heat of her Manhattan apartment. She spends most of her time at home in Virginia, but has travelled extensively in Nepal, Japan, Africa and India.

With New York sweltering in a record-breaking heat wave, I make my way to a small French restaurant on the Upper East Side to meet her. Tartt has an apartment nearby (having moved from Greenwich Village), but actually spends most of her time writing at her house "in the country". Persistent questioning narrows this down to the state of Virginia.

But here she is, 10 years later, sitting in a wonderful New York restaurant, fizzy and funny and talking about her new novel, The Little Friend, which shares with The Secret History the theme of a dark incident shaping a life but which in execution is southern and languorous and female and wholly different from its taut, masculine, east coast predecessor.

Current Project: "A novel I don't want to talk about."

Total Hits: 1112