About the authors... - British Book Awards

Despite her towering literary reputation, Donna Tartt is physically very small. As a baby, she was so tiny that her mother dressed her in doll's clothes. A decade after her first novel, The Secret History, Mississippi-born Tartt has delivered her eagerly awaited second, The Little Friend, (Bloomsbury £16.99), which conjures up the ambience of her Southern upbringing. She was born in 1963 and attended the University of Mississippi from where she transferred to Bennington College in Vermont. She spends most of her time at home in Virginia, but has travelled extensively in Nepal, Japan, Africa and India. The Secret History was a hugely successful fiction debut. Doubtless that made writing her second a daunting task, but Tartt has produced a richly beguiling follow-up. Set in Mississippi, The Little Friend pivots on the events of Mother's Day, when nine-year-old Robin Cleves was found hanged in his own back garden. Eleven years later, his death remains unsolved - which is why Harriet, now 12 and so unable to remember anything about her brother or his death, sets out to find the killer and exact her revenge. It's a powerful and involving southern gothic novel that has been well worth waiting for. Tartt's skill lies in rich evocations of scenes, characters and moods that fix themselves in the mind. The apparent dreaminess of her prose masks a razor edge, like a well-honed dagger concealed in velvet.

Publishing News UK

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The Secret History Donna Tartt audio cassette

The Little Friend Donna Tartt audio cd (abridged) audio cassette (unabridged)

Donna Tartt's The Secret History: A Reader's Guide Tracy Hargreaves

Best of the Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing edited by Mark Smirnoff

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