Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” ( The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. But unlike him, she has published each book ten years apart. Like Jeffery Eugenides, one has won the Pulitzer Prize. Donna Tartt, like Jeffery Eugenides, has written three books. Nothing much happens but also everything happens. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet-unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson-sets out to unmask his killer. It’s a book about a 12-year old avenging her brother’s murder but it’s so far beyond that. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. Harriets pursuit of Danny, at first comic, gathers fateful impetus as she and her best friend, Hely, stalk the Ratliffs, and eventually, as the plot attains. Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard.

“Destined to become a special kind of classic.” - The New York Times Book Review.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil.

The little friend book review