Book Bearings
The Goldfinch
- 862 pages · about 14 hours
- First published 2013
- 42 editions
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1 About this book
Theo Decker is thirteen and living in New York when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a bomb goes off. His mother is among the dead; Theo, dazed, leaves the wreckage with a small seventeenth-century Dutch painting she loved, The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius. With his father gone, he is taken in by the wealthy family of a school friend on Park Avenue. The novel, which Theo narrates looking back, follows the years after, in New York, Las Vegas and Amsterdam, as grief, guilt and the secret of the painting shape everything he does. Donna Tartt's third novel was published in 2013.
- Personal growth
- Loss (Psychology)
- Coming of age
- Survival
- Friendship
- Family life
- Bildungsromans
- Artists
2 What to expect
A very long coming-of-age novel: a thirteen-year-old New Yorker loses his mother in a museum bombing and leaves the ruins with a famous painting he cannot bring himself to give back. It follows him into adulthood through grief, guilt, friendship, addiction and the shady side of the art world. The prose is dense and richly detailed, the pace is leisurely, with stretches that drag, and opinion on the book has been sharply divided.
Good for readers who want: a big literary novel, grief and growing up, and art and its underworld.
3 About Donna Tartt
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Donna Tartt
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