Name: The Secret History
Rating: 4.271875000000001 (2336 reviews)
ISBN: 9781405529631

Donna Tartt

Truly deserving of the accolade 'modern classic', Donna Tartt's novel is a remarkable achievement - compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful. Under the influence of their charismatic Classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality, their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

The Secret History

Yoana Terzieva 

michaela

Lieke Nieuwlaat 

giuli

laila

julia

sybil

kristin :)

Iris van der zanden

lemon

tara  (she/her)

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Marz 

llikaditoo 

sofia mae

Tija

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. 

And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? 

Victoria Justice

Laura

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever. 

Victoria Morris

Inês Lemos S.

soph 

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

Stavros Kosmas

juana de arco si estuviera cronicamente online

🎠

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star... 

saad

Victoria

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not. 

Caroline 

Franzi

Lucia 

Storm

trezaa

Yoko simons 

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

Erin McDonald

jenna de nobrega 

lulu p :)

Julie <3

percy

Aimee :)

I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. 

Lili V Guba

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

Tanishq Khandelwal

Richard Papen, a relatively impoverished student at a New England college, falls in with an exclusive clique of rich, worldly Greek scholars and soon learns the dreadful secret that keeps them together. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

appropriately hyped. to the detriment of my responsibilities, i couldn't put the book down and read the last 400 pages in one sitting.

alice

asmareads b

omg.. could not put it down but then felt it dragged after the climax.. could have been 100-200 pages shorter. this book made me depressed and i never want to be smart or rich. 

Richard Papen had never been to New England before his nineteenth year. Then he arrived at Hampden College and quickly became seduced by the sweet, dark rhythms of campus life – in particular by an elite group of five students, Greek scholars, worldly, self-assured, and at first glance, highly unapproachable.

The Secret History 

Shawn Camp

Sex, Murder, and Mystery, rich spoiled college kids take life for granted and ends up screwing it all up. Everyone has had that loathing at some point when you just wish that reality will slap someone in the face that really deserved it. Well here's your chance! <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8719.Donna_Tartt" title="Donna Tartt" rel="nofollow noopener">Donna Tartt</a> shows us the lives of Henry, Francis, Richard, Charles, Camilla, and Bunny and with such finesse describes the life in a Vermont college for these spoiled snobs. But wait...the characters tend to come to life thanks to Tartt's writing and we really hope that things work out for them in the end, but part of us just wants to drop an anvil on their heads! The descriptions that Tartt provides are incredible to say the least and the period of winter helplessness that Richard experiences chills you to the bone. <blockquote>This was, I should say, about the third week in January. The thermometer was droping; my life, which before had been only solitary and miserable, became unbearable. Every day, in a daze, I walked to and from work, sometimes during weather that was ten or twenty below, sometimes during storms so heavy that all I could see was white, and the only way I made it home at all was by keeping close to the guard rail on the side if the road. Once home, I wrapped myself in my dirty blankets and fell on the floor like a dead man. All my moments were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.</blockquote> I actually had to dress warmer while reading his experience in a cold dark apartment. Throughout the book you know Richard will witness some shocking discovery of what is really happening, and thanks to Tartt again this isn't just dropped on us suddenly. She rather slowly reveals each secret such subtleness that it builds to the climax in a way that you feel for these characters even though they are such selfish snobs. This is one of my favorite reads this year and will reside on my shelf for years to come.

Absolutely love this and this is one of the few books id come back to over and over again 

Tiara Sharma

Loved it. But I feel it's not gay enough.

Vier jongens en een meisje vormen een exclusief groepje studenten klassiek Grieks aan een Amerikaans college waar hun experimenten met oude Griekse riten leiden tot twee moorden.

El secreto

kitkat

3’25⭐️ (?) En general me he quedado fría… La palabra concreta no es fria sino que no se como reaccionar al libro en si. Me ha gustado pero estoy confundida y con bastantes preguntas. Pensar que toda la historia es desde la perspectiva de Richard y que él mismo esta metido en todo, no sabes verdaderamente toda la historia.

The 30th anniversary edition of the bestseller that defined an age

'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.

The book is ultimately about the danger of confusing beauty with goodness. 

I mean, it’s just crazy like I just think it’s such an epic book. No review can do it justice. You just have to go through the experience of reading it.

It is broken up into book 1 and 2. And there was a point in the second section where I thought that the author kind of straight away from the central goal, but I think that’s really because I did not understand what the central goal was. I think that I learned through this book to be not so plot focused. 

I also think that the sort of moral of the story is quite nuanced and I like that I feel like a dumb person cannot read this book and selfishly that makes me feel good about it but also I think it says something about the book maybe. 

Arhant Srivastava

The book is ultimately about the danger of confusing beauty with goodness. 

I mean, it’s just crazy like I just think it’s such an epic book. No review can do it justice. You just have to go through the experience of reading it.

It is broken up into book 1 and 2. And there was a point in the second section where I thought that the author kind of straight away from the central goal, but I think that’s really because I did not understand what the central goal was. I think that I learned through this book to be not so plot focused. 

I also think that the sort of moral of the story is quite nuanced and I like that I feel like a dumb person cannot read this book and selfishly that makes me feel good about it but also I think it says something about the book maybe. 

9/10

wow didnt that go to shit /pos. slides into ao3

charlowwe

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about beauty is how easily it can make us forget to ask whether something is good.

Sara Líf

i have this strangely pleasant feeling that i'll never actually find a book like this ever again... it was beautifully twisted and i loved it wholly, so perhaps beauty really is terror and i'll just have to come back again and again

yachii

I could have read this book forever and been content, but the ending really sealed the 5/5 for me. I think the prose and commitment to ideas was excellent.

Hayley Sayre

Terribly difficult to get into and slightly disappointing to finish. 

The plot takes 150 pages and at least 3 months of me picking it up and putting it back down 10 minutes later to really pick up. Once it picks up it was quite good and I found myself raving about it to anyone who would listen, only to embarrass myself when I realized the plot completely falls off a cliff—along with Bunny—at the climax. 

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the ending was great, but all the moments between Bunny’s funeral and that had me wondering if that was really all this book had to offer. 

Mikala Hunt

Terribly difficult to get into and slightly disappointing to finish. 

The plot takes 150 pages and at least 3 months of me picking it up and putting it back down 10 minutes later to really pick up. Once it picks up it was quite good and I found myself raving about it to anyone who would listen, only to embarrass myself when I realized the plot completely falls off a cliff—along with Bunny—at the climax. 

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the ending was great, but all the moments between Bunny’s funeral and that had me wondering if that was really all this book had to offer. 



Edwin Lang

A question that I am sure occurred to Donna Tartt, the author of The Secret History, as well as to anyone reading her novel is why would anyone want to read about five rich kids and one self-professed liar from California. It occurred to me on page 180. Strangely, the book is really compelling. The liar, Richard Papen, is now twenty-eight and narrating the story of what happened to him in his first year at Hampden, in picturesque Vermont, after having abandoned the West coast to study ancient Greek. He was then gloomy and melancholy and felt his existence, at twenty, had been tainted by friendlessness, a mean father, a distant mother, an ugly house, a haircut too short and the need to wear cheap clothes and by the general blandness of his Californian small town. Through persistence and something of a miracle he received a scholarship to attend Hampden. Almost immediately Richard is attracted to an idiosyncratic professor, Julian Morrow, offering classes in ancient Greek to a class-sized at five. Richard would be six and thus unacceptable. Nonetheless. he manages to beguile his way into this master class. Here he meets the clique: Henry Winter, protagonist, a taciturn and wealthy but brilliant classicist and linguist who never completed grade ten; the twins, Camilla and Charles McCauley, clean, graceful and cheerful Flemish angelic orphans who were raised by their domineering and rich grandparents; Francis Abernathy, a wealthy Bostonian, born to an unmarried teen mother, with both he and his mother subsequently raised by rich grandparents, reputed to be decadent (and gay) but a decent and sensitive fellow; and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, a successful banker’s son, one of five boys who is a former football star and today is a sloppy, loud, obnoxiously garrulous, gum-chewing (but pleasant) lout and who is the antagonist. The story really begins when as readers around page 170 we learn that four of them (Henry, the twins and Francis) go on a Bacchanal, and when in a drunken hallucogenic state, Henry accidently kills a man, a farmer who had aggressively demanded that the kids leave his property. I call them ‘kids’ because, although twenty or twenty-one years old, all are alone, even Richard and Bunny when they learn of the story, groping their way through this tragedy and catastrophe in their otherwise well-ordered and happy lives. Even Julian Morrow is no help, he who had seduced their minds with silly ideas, many of which were inherently revolutionary. What I liked about Donna Tartt’s approach was that she withheld judgment and basically unfolds the drama in their still-young and unformed lives from their various perspectives, always with Richard narrating and from his own perspective. We readers are also not subjected to a morality tale. We are also not subjected to an imposition of the accepted State moral fable wherein a perpetrator is necessarily punished by his or her conscience (as per Dostoyevsky), or by State law or by Fate’s exacting revenge. In this it is a kind tale. Tragedy though hangs over all like a Damocles sword and there are repercussions. Bunny dies. Julian Morrow reveals himself for what he really is. The twins break. And even Richard redeems himself. Carefully constructed edifices fall. Henry though is and remains heroic and intact. I liked The Secret History a lot and recommend it. Edwin

Donna Tartt's The Secret History is the original American campus novel. When Richard Papen joins an elite group of clever misfits at his New England college, it seems he can finally become the person he wants to be. But the moral boundaries he will cross with his new friends - and the deaths they are responsible for - will change all of their lives forever. The Secret History recounts the terrible price we pay for mistakes made on the dark journey to adulthood.

cass

wow, okay, where to begin?
i will be the first to admit that i struggled to get into this book initially - the first 100-200 pages felt largely purposeless, and i was looking for a clear plot to grip onto, that i know the book had to have had due to praise from others on the plot line. but oh my god, when this book is good, its fucking good. the characters are complex in a way that feels so real and humane, <spoiler> and the development of charles and his addiction and slow fall to insanity was masterfully constructed </spoiler> and came across so perfectly. this for me is the brilliance within donna tartt, her ability to perfectly crete characters like no one else. 
i think because the book was written in the 90s, the air of pseudo intellectualism seemed more captaviating and apparent…. and legit?? in comparison to contemporary campus novels, the deeper story and ideas felt more grounded and genuine, and i feel that the era it was written and the pacing is generally the reason behind this.
julian, to me, was a very puzzling character. he felt so minor - i didn’t really find myself being able to develop a connection or deep affection to him in the way that the classics group did. we were consistently told about this love all 5 of them had felt towards him as the professor, but apart from henry, and potentially francis, i couldn’t really understand how richard (and even the twins?!) had come to develop such strong emotions towards him. i wish we had gotten to see the establishment of that connection more; it felt very…. i don’t even know, but i really wanted more purpose behind richard’s kinship for julian he intensely detailed in the closing chapters of the novel. 
donna tart is a brilliant writer, i have zero doubt in my mind about that. i can very clearly see why it’s so loved, because it truly feels so human, really fucking liked this, would have been higher if it was a bit shorter, i really felt there was a lot of aspects that didn’t necessarily need to be included and made the novel even longer.

Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.'A haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction' The Times'So irresistible and seductive it's almost a guilty pleasure' GuardianUnder the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.'Enthralling . . . image the plot of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment crossed with the story of Euripides' Bacchae set against the backdrop of Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction . . . forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled . . . ferociously well-paced . . . remarkably powerful' The New York Times'Donna Tartt is an amazingly good writer. She's dense, she's allusive. She's a gorgeous storyteller' Stephen KingDonna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages, and The Goldfinch.

Sara T-son

A misfit at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds kindred spirits in the five eccentric students of his ancient Greek class. But his new friends have a horrific secret. When blackmail and violence threaten to blow their privileged lives apart, they drag Richard into the nightmare that engulfs them. And soon they enter a terrifying heart of darkness from which they may never return.

Jennifer

Crime and Punishment meets a more messed up version of How To Get Away With Murder season one + homosexuality + Greek history and mythology + sexual taboos 

aishah

hotdamhistorian

Tajemna historia

erin

this book is full of terrible people tainted with probably what you might think is the worst world can offer, amoral and self-centred and completely fucked-up, but since it’s fiction i can’t even bring myself to hate them. well, maybe except bunny, but he was entertaining at times, quite funny, so i kind of feel slightly teeny tiny little bit bad for him. but he’s a racist bigot so i don’t really care /that/ much. henry is literally the worst of them all (or not! it depends on whether or not you interpret how he ended up doing things he did), but he’s also my lil meow meow and i will fight anyone to defend him. he's unhinged and insane and i absolutely love it about him. francis is also one of my favorites here, because he’s just like me (gay anxious and sewercidal). he’s also got this sensitive heart, he’s a little bit weak, and he’s so likeable; but he’s always the one that seems to exist without much hope, a bit hysterical. he was also the one who ended up being the Good one, at least it seemed that way to me. i want to step into that book and make him happy !!! it’s tearing me apart. i also feel super bad for charles; he’s the one who had to deal with all the aftermath, and in the end he’s made into this ruined person. he’s not a saint, but there’s something weirdly likeable about him. camilla, on the other hand, has the guts to be unapologetic, she’s distant and mysterious and cold and I LOVE HER.

coco nini

started a bit slow for me, but good either way !! 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt ⭐⭐⭐⭐

from the beginning, i was enticed by reading it more and finished it asap because i was confused with what this book all about. i got many spoilers from pinterest and booktok, why would they do it? but as i read it day by day, there was full tension in this book. i felt nervous and amazed by how it's written and there were words that i'm not really familiar with. all in all, it's a good book and i felt sad by the last parts of it. this was the first time i read a long book with over 500 pages, and the first time i read a mystery/thriller book.

stephie

The Secret History by Donna Tartt ⭐⭐⭐⭐
from the beginning, i was enticed by reading it more and finished it asap because i was confused with what this book all about. i got many spoilers from pinterest and booktok, why would they do it? but as i read it day by day, there was full tension in this book. i felt nervous and amazed by how it's written and there were words that i'm not really familiar with. all in all, it's a good book and i felt sad by the last parts of it. this was the first time i read a long book with over 500 pages, and the first time i read a mystery/thriller book.

Last half of the book really picked up but omg the first half was slow. It took me forever to get through. (Yes, read it while moving / nesting for my first child but still, longer than it should have) 

That being said, Tartt is a wonderful writer and is creative with plot and characters. 

Sarah Wilson

Last half of the book really picked up but omg the first half was slow. It took me forever to get through. (Yes, read it while moving / nesting for my first child but still, longer than it should have) 

That being said, Tartt is a wonderful writer and is creative with plot and characters. 

Yulez

A good one-time read. Unexpected ending, and I finished this book in 2 days....which means that it kept me engaged, and I just want to know what happens next. Very unique setting and the theme of the book will make you pause and think of what's the fuck is going on. 

The Secret History

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club