Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's The Secret History opens with a death and then makes you wait to understand it. It's a literary thriller about a clique of classics students at a New England college whose hunger for beauty hardens into something monstrous. Come for the intelligence and dread; stay for sentences that ache.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning novel follows a boy who survives the museum bombing that kills his mother and spends the rest of his life orbiting a small stolen painting, a sprawling coming-of-age story for readers who want grief rendered at the length it actually takes.