Where to start with Donna Tartt

American novelist, born 1963. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014.

Best Donna Tartt book to start with: The Goldfinch (2013), on 3 of the 15 lists it could have made.

The lists rank The Goldfinch first, but The Secret History is the better place to begin. It is shorter, and it is the book that made her name. A group of classics students at a New England college are drawn into a murder, and the book cares more about how it happened than about who did it. It reads fast.

The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize the same year. A boy survives an explosion at an art museum and leaves with a small painting, and the story follows him into adulthood. It is very long, so read it when you have time.

The Little Friend was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2003. It is set in Mississippi, in a family still grieving a child’s death, and it is the slowest and most Southern of the three, so it suits a patient reader.