Published in 2013, The Golden Finch novel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that should be added to your reading list.
The Goldfinch begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love—and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher’s calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It’s a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.
Tartt’s mesmerizing language engages all your senses and paints a vivid picture of everything in Theo’s world. Even minor scenery of a busy street, “…just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creature pushing and struggling to live.” Rise and fall with Theo, you will love him.
The Goldfinch novel produced a movie of the same name in 2019. The cast starred Ansel Elgort as Theodore Decker, with supporting roles by Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, and Nicole Kidman.
Donna Tartt is an American writer, born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised 32 miles away in Grenada, Mississippi. Tartt is the author of The Secret History and was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend. Her 2014 novel, The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize.
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