“I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?” he asks, the high priest of his own tiny cult.Įvery cult, of course, has its rituals – and this is where things take a turn, first bacchanalian, then deadly. All of them are acolytes of charismatic Classics professor Julian Morrow, who only accepts a handful of pupils into his class each year. Eventually, he’s inducted into their coterie: there is Henry, the de facto leader and “linguistic genius”, Francis, “the most exotic of the set’’, twins Charles and Camilla, and the ill-fated Bunny, WASP-y and brash. He’s instantly enthralled by a group of Classicists who keep themselves well apart from their peers (aided by their insistence on littering conversations with Greek and Latin). Richard Papen, the Nick Carraway-ish narrator, arrives at Hampden College on financial aid, amid a sea of wealthy, druggy students. Somewhere between a campus novel and a thriller, the 600-odd pages of Tartt’s “whydunnit” are propelled by unease, dread and recrimination. Books of the month: From Ian McEwan’s Lessons to Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes.Her story also chimes with “the current resurgence of Greek mythology retellings” in the industry too, says book publicist Emily Goulding (think Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, another BookTok favourite, or Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls).
Gen Z has adopted the author as the originator of “dark academia”, the moody literary aesthetic that is wildly popular on TikTok (all sepia-toned shots of dreaming spires… and plaid, lots of it). The book’s cult appeal is only growing stronger. Since its release in 1992, the novel has sold more than 2.3 million copies in English alone, and her work has been translated into 40 languages.
It’s a literary beginning that has lost none of its power over the past three decades, and neither has Tartt’s book. A death that has prompted “one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history”. There’s a “body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck”. At the start of Donna Tartt’s debut novel, which turns 30 this month, we’re queasily aware that something unspeakable has happened. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” The Secret History haunts you from its very first sentence.
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