Donna Tartt: The Little Friend

THE LITTLE FRIEND

Donna Tartt

Praise for The Little Friend

‘Tartt’s painstaking care is evident from the first page. Beautifully written and immaculately crafted, it’s the kind of book that wraps you up in it’s pages and takes you to another place … the pages turn themselves. Even though there’s humour, the tension is palpable. Unputdownable’

Daily Mirror

‘A sprawling story of vengeance, with few wasted words, told in a rich, controlled voice’

Time

‘The brilliance of The Little Friend resides in Tartt’s ability to observe with the skewed clarity of a child – or a drug addict … Tartt’s novel sets an elegant, implacable trap for a reader’s consciousness, from which it is impossible to escape until the final sentence’

Jane Shilling’s Book of the Year, Sunday Telegraph

‘This complex, leisurely yet thrilling tale of twelve-year-old Harriet’s search for her brother’s killer is suffused by the writer’s power over both character and landscape, and more than that it is a deeply moral tale’

Erica Wagner, The Times

‘A dazzling tour de force ’

Daily Mail

‘Her book is a ruthlessly precise reckoning of the world as it is – drab, ugly, scary, inconclusive – filtered through the bright colours and impossible demands of childhood perception. It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it’s all just make-believe’

New York Times Book Review

‘Astoundingly well-paced, her fiction satisfies what may be our hard-wired hunger for narrative’

New Statesman

‘If you read only one book this year, make it this’

Company

‘It is when Tartt almost glancingly describes the daily, lethargic weight of the sorrow that affects a family torn apart by the death of its most wanted child that she reveals her extraordinary qualities’

David Hare, Observer

‘Tartt is still a master of beauty, and this in conjunction with her sensitivity to loss and strangeness combines in peerless descriptions of the beloved and the grotesque’

Los Angeles Times

‘Unsettling, eerie and beautifully written, Tartt’s second coming is worth the wait’

GQ

‘It is powered by that same terrible tension that arises from watching characters stray into narratives that they cannot understand. Tartt tells her nightmarish tale in dreamy prose – stylish, luxuriant and devastatingly streamlined’

Daily Mail

‘Tartt’s skilful and evocative writing keeps you hooked until the very end’

Red

‘You leave the book mesmerised by the world. You can feel the heat of that southern summer, you can hear the porch doors clack shut … Brilliant’

Irish Independent

‘A great read, and a story everyone will be talking about. Grab a copy now and buy your friend one before she reads nabs yours’

Eve

‘If you are hungry for the “simple” pleasures of well-crafted, stylish and highly intelligent entertainment, you’ll be glad to make the acquaintance of The Little Friend ’

Washington Post

‘This is seductive, thrilling storytelling at its best’

Evening Standard

‘Harriet’s world is utterly charming and absorbing … Tartt’s picture of a child’s inventive and dynamic mind is so convincing that the dangers facing Harriet don’t occur to the reader until it is too late. Exhilarating and soothing by turns, Harriet’s story is compulsive reading’

Daily Express

For Neal

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lessor things.

—SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, SUMMA THEOLOGICA I, 1, 5 AD 1.

"Ladies and gentleman, I am now locked up in a handcuff that has taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best."

—HARRY HOUDINI, LONDON HIPPODROME, SAINT PATRICK’S DAY, 1904

PROLOGUE

For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. Dissatisfaction had been expressed by the elder Cleves at the new arrangement; and while this mainly had to do with suspicion of innovation, on principle, Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come; a warning which, though obscure even in hindsight, was perhaps as good as any we can ever hope to receive in this life.

Though the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history—repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire deathbed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before—the events of this terrible Mother’s Day were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruelest and most random disasters—the death, by fire, of one of Charlotte’s infant cousins; the hunting accident in which Charlotte’s uncle had died while she was still in grammar school—were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth: the angry fireman, failing in his efforts to resuscitate the tiny body, transmuted sweetly into a weeping one; the moping bird dog, puzzled for several weeks by her master’s death, recast as the grief-stricken Queenie of family legend, who searched relentlessly for her beloved throughout the house and howled, inconsolable, in her pen all night; who barked in joyous welcome whenever the dear ghost approached in the yard, a ghost that only she could perceive. “Dogs can see things that we can’t,” Charlotte’s aunt Tat always intoned, on cue, at the proper moment in the story. She was something of a mystic and the ghost was her innovation.

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin’s death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day’s events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.

Sometimes these vivid flashes of memory seemed like pieces of a bad dream, as if none of it had ever happened. Yet in many ways it seemed the only real thing that had happened in Charlotte’s life.