Literary Fiction · DarkA boy survives a museum explosion in New York and leaves with a small painting
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
A thirteen-year-old loses his mother in an accident and keeps a small painting
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives an accident that kills his mother and moves in with the family of a wealthy friend on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He holds on to a small painting that links him to his mother, and it pulls him into the art world. As an adult he works at an antiques shop and moves among wealthy social circles, where his choices lead him into growing danger.
More about this book
Who
Theo Decker, thirteen, who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. A bomb explodes, and she is killed. Theo survives, with a ring from a dying elderly man and a small painting, Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch, which he takes as he escapes. He moves in with the wealthy family of a school friend, Andy Barbour, and meets Hobie, the old man's business partner, and Pippa, a red-haired girl he had noticed at the museum.
World
New York City, beginning at the Met during an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces.
What makes it different
Theo tells the story himself, looking back. The painting is real: Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt, finished it in 1654, the year an explosion in Delft killed him and destroyed most of his work. Tartt had wanted to write about Amsterdam for about twenty years, and she was partly inspired by the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
Feel
Literary fiction about loss, obsession, coming of age and the role of art. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal.