It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Secret History

The Secret History

30th anniversary edition

Summary

THE BESTSELLER THAT DEFINED AN AGE

With cloth binding and bespoke marbled endpapers, this gorgeous 30th-anniversary hardback edition of The Secret History is the perfect gift for fans!


'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

'Haunting, compelling and brilliant' The Times

'Irresistible and seductive' Guardian

'Enthralling... Forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled' New York Times

Reviews

  • The Secret History succeeds magnificently ... A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment ... Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled
    New York Times

About the author

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more