The Little Friend

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 a 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.