"a trustworthy storyteller"

“2014's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Donna Tartt, for her latest novel The Goldfinch.
     Tartt's sprawling epic triumphed over the two other nominees, The Son by Philip Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis.
     Tartt's novel tells the story of Theodore Decker, an orphaned Manhattanite who winds up in possession of a renowned painting, Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch." Tartt's coming of age story follows Theo to Las Vegas, New York City's Lower East Side, and Amsterdam, where the events of his life are intermixed with his burgeoning theories on art and love.”
— Maddie Crum, Huffington Post
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“One of the greatest of Tartt's many gifts is her ability to assure readers that they're in the hands of a trustworthy storyteller. Her novels always feature surprising, in some cases preposterous, narrative elements, but she makes us believe them. She'll wrong-foot us, but she won't cheat us. Characters will certainly go off the rails, but the plot won't. This is an amazing achievement.”
— Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Times (October 17, 2013)
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See an earlier post that mentions The Goldfinch here...

And buy all of Donna Tartt's books here...

big book

"[…] consider the novelist — in this case Donna Tartt, whose first novel, The Secret History, published in 1992, was greeted with critical hosannas and excellent sales. Her follow-up, The Little Friend, was published 10 years later. This means she labored over The Goldfinch, her latest novel, for at least as long. Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there must be periods of self-doubt. To write a novel this large and dense is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting. Especially when there are storms. Suppose, the writer thinks (must think), this is all for nothing? What if I’m failing and don’t know it? What if I make the crossing and am greeted not with cheers but with indifference or even contempt?

     It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of The Goldfinch, they never do."
— Stephen King, The New York Times
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