The Little Friend: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

The second novel by Donna Tartt,  bestselling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize),  The Little Friend  is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.


The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother€s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents€ yard. Twelve years later Robin€s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin€s sister Harriet€"unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town€s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family€s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and €œa bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens€ (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.