Donna Tartt Shrine | Press | Synopsis
Synopsis
"Like Salinger and Heller before her, Tartt has become a cult figure."
- The Observer, 7/28/2002The Little Friend - A Novel by Donna Tartt
 Read the Prologue.
The hugely anticipated new novel by the author of The Secret History a best-seller nationwide and around the world, and one of the most astonishing debuts in recent times The Little Friend is even more transfixing and resonant.
In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes grows up in the shadow of her brother, who when she was only a baby was found hanging dead from a black-tupelo tree in their yard. His killer was never identified, nor has his family, in the years since, recovered from the tragedy.
For Harriet, who has grown up largely unsupervised, in a world of her own imagination, her brother is a link to a glorious past she has only heard stories about or glimpsed in photograph albums. Fiercely determined, precocious far beyond her twelve years, and steeped in the adventurous literature of Stevenson, Kipling, and Conan Doyle, she resolves, one summer, to solve the murder and exact her revenge. Harriet's sole ally in this quest, her friend Hely, is devoted to her, but what they soon encounter has nothing to do with child's play: it is dark, adult, and all too menacing.
A revelation of familial longing and sorrow, The Little Friend explores crime and punishment, as well as the hidden complications and consequences that hinder the pursuit of truth and justice. A novel of breathtaking ambition and power, it is rich in moral paradox, insights into human frailty, and storytelling brilliance.
Harriet Cleve Dusfrenes grows up haunted by the murder of her brother. His killer was never identified, and the family never recovered from the tragedy. Harriet lives largely in the world of her imagination, alone even in company. Then one day she decides to find his murderer and exact her revenge.
The Little Friend is the story of Harriet Dusfresnes, a young girl who has grown up under the shadow of her brother's unsolved murder. She was just a baby when her brother Robin was found hanging from a tree in the yard. The murder tore at the fabric of her family, sending her father away and leaving her mother paralyzed by grief. At age twelve, Harriet decides to find and punish the murderer of the brother she's loved only through photographs and stories.
For Bloomsbury, the company that has paid almost £1m for The Little Friend, the novel's publication in a year which sees it deprived of a new Harry Potter title will be an anxious, as well as exciting, moment. Other London publishers, invited to bid for the book, were not unanimous in their praise. At least one found The Little Friend "deeply disappointing". But Alexandra Pringle, Tartt's publisher at Bloomsbury, is delighted with "a breathtaking novel", and is convinced "that people will still be reading this book in 50 years time".
Reports do speak of a brilliant opening section: a suspenseful account of a horror beyond repair that suddenly strikes a close-knit family on a stormy spring evening. For the moment, The Little Friend remains pretty much a secret history. But as St Thomas Aquinas (whom Tartt has certainly read) once wrote, "The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of lesser things."
Beyond any doubt, the book will surprise readers who expect more of the Tartt recipe as before. She has disclosed that "when I was writing this book I was thinking very much about Stevenson, whom I love, very much about Treasure Island and the pirates". She has called it "a book about children - but not for children. It's a... scary book about children coming contact with the world of adults, in a very frightening way." The ride will be scary, perhaps, for Bloomsbury's shareholders as well.
[...]
So far as we know, The Little Friend will plunge readers into the deep, lingering emotions of a multi-generational family, rather than the neurasthenic fads and frenzies of a self-selected college elite. It promises to establish her as a more rounded and mature voice than the fey sprite who conjured up The Secret History. The new novel may also brand her as a strongly Southern writer, in the rich regional vein that runs from Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor to Eudora Welty - the revered and prolific Mississippi novelist who died last year, aged 92. Some American lives, at least, can have many long and satisfying acts.
excerpted from The Secret History: Whatever happened to Donna Tartt?
 Listen to it
Full Unexpurgated Interview - Listen to it
Donna Tartt, on her novel, tentatively titled "Tribulation" (The Little Friend)
Excerpt from the interview
"When I was writing this book I was thinking very much about Stevenson, who I love, very much about Treasure Island and the pirates, and you know, Long John Silver, - books that I loved as a child. This is a book about children, but it's not a book for children. It's a frightening book. It's a scary book. It's fairly dark. It's about children coming into contact with adults. It doesn't take place wholly in the world of children (when I say children, I mean twelve years old...) And coming into contact with the world of adults in a very frightening way. (...) It's finished. I'm doing the edits now, the rewriting..." - Donna Tartt
First book/date: The Secret History, 1992
Current book: The Little Friend, November 2002
Years to write: 10
Pages: 608
Average Number of words written each day: 47
Comments (2)
HARRIET
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Loved it. Felt cheated by the ending. Please can someone fill in the last piece of the puzzle and tell me WHO KILLED ROBIN!!!!!
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Donna Tartt Shrine | The Little Friend
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