Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and he keeps it for years — through a rich family on Park Avenue, an abandoned Las Vegas subdivision where he half-raises himself with a Ukrainian kid named Boris, and back to New York and the antiques trade and the criminal end of the art world. Tartt took eleven years on it and it runs eight hundred pages. It won the Pulitzer and split critics down the middle. This one lands on “terrific.”
The Goldfinch