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Books

Donna Tartt can do the thrills but not the trauma

Philip Hensher reviews The Goldfinch

12 October 2013

9:00 AM

12 October 2013

9:00 AM

The Goldfinch Donna Tartt

Little, Brown, pp.771, £20

Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels.

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Philip Hensher latest novel, Scenes from Early Life, won this year’s Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize.

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