About the book
Donna Tartt's first novel is a campus story set at Hampden, an exclusive small college in Vermont. Richard Papen arrives from Plano, California, to study literature and wins a place among the hand-picked students of Julian Morrow, the charismatic professor who teaches Classics and Greek to a closed circle. Drawn into a way of thinking and living far from that of their classmates, the group moves beyond the limits of ordinary morality, and Richard, narrating years later, reflects on how they came to kill. Told as an inverted detective story, it is credited with launching the dark academia sub-genre. It became a best seller after an unusually large first print order of 75,000 copies.
Dave Child, founder of Readable.io, said it was his favorite book in his twenties and one that resists any label, never quite a murder mystery or a crime thriller, though he found it weaker on a second reading.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Dave Child (Founder/Readable.io)
In my 20s, it would have been The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It's a shame you can only read a book for the first time once, because this doesn't fare so well the second time around, when you already know what happens. I'm not sure I've found another book quite like it since, but then I'm not really sure what sort of book it is. It isn't a murder mystery, except when it is. It isn't a crime thriller, except when it is. It isn't a love story, except ... you get the idea.
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