The secret history

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Donna Tartt: The secret history (2002, Viking)

523 pages

Published March 29, 2002 by Viking.

ISBN:
978-0-670-84365-7
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4 stars (15 reviews)

In a rural Vermont college, a group of Classics students get carried away at a bacchanal, and an innocent man is killed. To what lengths will the students go, to protect their clique?

12 editions

Cold, calculating fiction.

5 stars

Everything about this book is perfect, the writing flows beautifully and the plot is abhorrently complex. Donna Tarte pays perfect attention to events in the story, you can look back after all is revealed and see when these events happened, and what's most pleasant, is that it is hard to figure out why exactly the Murder takes place but you can still piece the story together just before all is revealed. The extensive reference to classical literature was a delight for me. Overall a thrilling read which I would recommend to anyone.

Review of 'The secret history' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Donna Tartt's debut 1992 novel, The Secret History, opens with a prologue that lets the reader know, straight away, that Bunny will be murdered by his closest friends, and that this story will be told in the first person by one of them.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

This is Richard Papen's story, and he starts out by telling us the truth about his rather boring and poor childhood in Northern California, which he quickly replaces for a much more satisfying--and fictional--life when he manages to acquire the financial aide he needs to attend an expensive, tiny college in Vermont, which is about as far away from his dreaded home as he can get. Once there, he discovers that one of …

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