The Little Friend

Donna Tartt is a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her first novel, The Secret History, has been published in twenty-three countries.

Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city, and her serene sister rarely notices anything. All of them are still suffering from the shocking and mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier, and it seems to Harriet that the family may never recover. So, inspired by Captain Scott, Houdini, and Robert Louis Stevenson, she sets out with her only friend Hely to find Robin's murderer and punish him. But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dark and dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town.

'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'

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

'Tartt's grip on this billowing plot is glue-like and her ability to evoke the Deep South of last century exceptional ... excellent, enthralling'

'Destined to become a special kind of classic - a book that precocious young readers pluck from their parents' shelves and devour with surreptitious eagerness, thrilled to discover a writer who seems at once to read their minds and to offer up the sweet-and-sour fruits of exotic, forbidden knowledge'