The Secret History

In the Vermont hills, a group of unusually gifted Greek scholars murder one of their own — and the narrator, Richard Papen, knows who did it and why. What Donna Tartt’s debut novel does, with astonishing assurance, is place this fact on the first page and then spend the next six hundred pages explaining how a group of intelligent, cultivated young people came to believe that murder was not only possible but necessary.

The Secret History, published in 1992 when Tartt was twenty-eight, is the novel that invented the dark academia genre — and it remains its finest achievement. The portrait of collegiate intellectual life, of the particular intoxication of ideas seriously held and beauty genuinely worshipped, is as compelling as the central mystery. The characters are drawn with novelistic completeness: flawed, brilliant, self-deceiving, and ultimately recognisable in their self-destruction.

One of the great American novels of the last thirty years — a book that readers return to obsessively and that has never lost its power to astonish. Essential for anyone who loves fiction that takes both ideas and storytelling completely seriously. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.