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. At the start of Donna Tartt’s debut novel, which turns 30 this month, we’re queasily aware that something unspeakable has happened. There’s a “body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck”. A death that has prompted “one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history”. How did it come to this?
It’s a literary beginning that has lost none of its power over the past three decades, and neither has Tartt’s book. 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. The book’s cult appeal is only growing stronger. 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). 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).
