Short Reviews

Gorgeous, fluent, visual ... Harriet is one of the most engaging and rounded characters you are liely to find.

You will rarely read better ... because of Tartt’s mastery of suspense, this book will grip readers all the way through to its bitter end.

In a literary age of diet and dearth, Tartt invites us to feast.

Tartt is interested in everyone and everything; that is what makes nearly all her characters live off the page ... gorgeous, fluent, visual; erudite but never distracting.

Tartt has lost none of the considerable gifts she displayed in her first novel; she is one of the most mesmerizing writers of her generation.

Dense and richly textured, it is a beautifully observed study of class, race and family in a small Southern town … A mesmerising portrait of the singular and complex character of its 12-year-old heroine.

In a literary age of diet and dearth, Tartt invites us to feast … The opening tragedy strikes a note of rich, flamboyant Southern Gothic that resonates throughout.

Tartt’s novel sets an elegant, implacable trap for a reader’s consciousness, from which it is impossible to escape until the final sentence.

Twelve-year-old Harriet, the book's heroine, is launched into adventure, hellbent on discovering who murdered her brother when she was a baby. In the interplay between Harriet's pernickety old aunts and the demonic Farish Ratliff, a paranoid, piratical speed dealer, we see Tartt's best writing: whip-smart, bold and engaging. Its thrusts towards resolution are met by ambiguity, and it may disappoint those hungry for the neat solution of the traditional murder mystery; yet Tartt has quite brilliantly confounded genre expectations and delivered a Bildungsroman of great sophistication.

This is great Southern Gothic at its most voluptuous.

The wait has been well worthwhile ... the central figure of Tartt's magnificent second novel is Harriet, a precocious prepubescent girl growing up in the Deep South in an extended matriarchal household. She becomes convinced the death of her older brother many years before was a case of murder and, with the aid of a playmate, plans to wreak her revenge. The Little Friend has everything you could possibly want in a novel: vivid characterisation, brilliant observation, sly wit and an ingenious, gripping plot.

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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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