Books Like The Secret History

Why Each Pick

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's third novel, with the same long, immersive prose and a narrator who drifts into a world of wealth, beauty and crime. Theo Decker survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum as a boy and secretly keeps a priceless painting. It trades the college setting for New York, Las Vegas and Amsterdam, and at 771 pages it is even longer and more sprawling.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A classic The Secret History is often compared with. A poor former student in St. Petersburg convinces himself that an extraordinary person may kill, then commits a murder and comes apart under the weight of guilt. Like Tartt's students, he believes ideas place him above ordinary morality. Dostoevsky is denser and more philosophical, with a strong focus on redemption.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The aestheticism that seduces Tartt's students, at its source. A beautiful young man falls under the influence of a witty mentor who preaches beauty and pleasure above morality, and his portrait records the damage he does. Lord Henry plays a role close to Julian Morrow's. Wilde's novel is short, at 254 pages, epigrammatic and gothic rather than realistic.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

An outsider narrator dazzled by a glamorous, wealthy circle, who stays loyal while its members do terrible things. Richard Papen, a scholarship student from California, has a lot in common with Nick Carraway, and both books end in disillusion. Fitzgerald sets his story among 1920s Long Island mansions and tells it in just 180 pages.

In the Woods by Tana French

A literary mystery with a narrator who admits up front that he lies, and a past crime that refuses to stay buried. Detective Rob Ryan investigates a child's murder in the Dublin woods where his own childhood friends vanished. Like Tartt, French cares more about character and atmosphere than about a neat solution. It is a police procedural, at 429 pages.

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

A murder at Oxford, a tight group of students, and a narrator who must revisit what really happened ten years later. Hannah's glamorous roommate was killed in their first year, and new evidence suggests the wrong man was convicted. Ruth Ware writes a much faster, plot-driven thriller, closer to a whodunit than to Tartt's slow literary study of guilt.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

A privileged, insular group of friends, a summer of secrets and a narrator who cannot face what happened. Cadence spends summers with her wealthy family on a private island, and her memory of one summer has gaps. It is a young adult novel, short at 227 pages, with a twist ending best left unspoiled, so read it knowing as little as possible.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

For readers who loved the Greek half of The Secret History. Miller retells the story of Achilles through Patroclus, a narrator devoted to someone more dazzling than himself, much like Richard with Henry and the twins. It is a love story and a myth rather than a crime novel, and the mood is lyrical and tragic rather than cold and ironic.