Read With Us

Read With Us Selection
Winter 2025

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

General Information About the Book

559 pages

Published September 1992, Vintage Press

Genres: literary fiction, psychological suspense, psychological thriller, suspense, thriller, “dark academia”

Available in paperback ($9.08 Amazon), Kindle ($12.00), and audio (Audible 1 credit); immediately available via Libby in both text or audio (although it was not available in text form at Kym’s library)

“A long tale of friendship, arrogance, and murder knit together with the finesse that many writers will never have . . . Her writing bewitches us . . . The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Join Us For the Book Discussion on Zoom

Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 7:00 pm Eastern time
Questions will also be posted on our blogs: Highly Reasonable, Carole Knits, Dancing At the Edge.

Please RSVP to receive Zoom link information by emailing Kym Mulhern (email in sidebar) by March 24, 2025. Thank you.

“But one mustn’t underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.”

― Donna Tartt in The Secret History

Brief Synopsis

From Goodreads

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

Information About the Author

Image from Airship Daily

Bio information from Curtis Brown, Ltd. (literary agent)

Donna Tartt is a novelist, essayist and critic. Her debut novel, The Secret History, was a bestseller and has been published in thirty languages across the world. Her second novel, The Little Friend, won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Goldfinch, was published in October 2013. It has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction. It has been shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel was also awarded Italy’s Malaparte Prize.

Donna Tartt has been named one of TIME‘s 100 Most Influential People and featured on Vanity Fair‘s International Best Dressed List 2014. She has also been named as one of the 1,000 Most Influential People in London by the Evening Standard.

Book Reviews

Book of The Times; Students Indulging in Course of Destruction by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, September 4, 1992 (gift link; scroll down quite far for review)
The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on by Clare Thorp, BBC Features Correspondent, October 21, 2022
Ten reasons why we love Donna Tartt’s The Secret History by John Mullen, The Guardian, October 18, 2013.

Author Interviews

This link is to a Today Show interview with Donna Tartt in late 2022 when The Secret History was selected as a Read With Jenna book club pick. In it, Tartt answers “11 questions about The Secret History.” (NOTE: This is a print interview.)

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Supplemental Resources

Story Summary

From The Well Read Company Book Club

Our September spotlight falls on The Secret History by Donna Tartt. This enthralling literary thriller is often hailed as a modern classic, earning praise for its sophisticated narrative style and intricate character exploration. The novel immerses readers in the world of a close-knit group of classics students at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, led by their enigmatic professor, Julian Morrow.

The story is narrated by Richard Papen, a Californian who arrives at Hampden seeking a fresh start. He soon becomes infatuated with the charm and intellect of this particular group, only to discover a dark secret they share – a secret that binds them together in a web of complicity, guilt, and paranoia. As the layers of this chilling tale are peeled back, we delve into the paradoxes of human nature, the dangerous allure of beauty, and the thin line separating civilization from barbarity.

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

Donna Tartt weaves a compelling narrative that is as intricate as it is engrossing. From the opening lines, the reader is made aware of the central crime, yet it’s the unfolding ‘why’ and ‘how’ that propels this narrative with an inexorable pull. Tartt masterfully juxtaposes the aesthetic appreciation of the ancient Greeks with the moral deterioration of her characters, offering a rich tapestry of philosophy, art, and human frailty. The ambiance, seeped in an air of intellectualism and decadence, becomes a character of its own – making the tale all the more haunting.

In The Secret History, Donna Tartt raises age-old questions about good and evil, posing a challenge to our preconceptions of morality. The novel serves not only as a riveting mystery but as a deep dive into the complexities of human psychology and the lengths individuals will go to protect their own.