The Goldfinch
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother and, in the chaos afterward, walks out with a small seventeenth-century Dutch painting that a dying man has pressed into his hands: Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch. For the next decade, through a chilly Park Avenue foster family, the sun-scoured suburbs of Las Vegas, antiquarian shops in New York, and the criminal underworld of Amsterdam, the painting stays hidden in Theo's possession, the one fixed point in a life organized around his mother's absence. Donna Tartt's 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner is a long, old-fashioned novel about loss, addiction, beauty, and the uses of art, written with the density of Dickens and the dark humor of a coming-of-age noir.
Where The Goldfinch keeps showing up
Six of our editors' lists feature this novel.
Also by Donna Tartt
Books in conversation with The Goldfinch
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about The Goldfinch
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother. Carrying a small seventeenth-century painting given to him by a dying old man, he is taken in by a wealthy Park Avenue family, then by his absent father in Las Vegas.
Yes. The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Donna Tartt also wrote The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), with each novel taking around a decade to complete.
Yes. A 2019 film adaptation directed by John Crowley and starring Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman was released. The film was critically and commercially unsuccessful and is generally considered a weak adaptation of the long novel.
The Goldfinch was written by Donna Tartt, published in 2013 by Little Brown & Company.
The Goldfinch is 862 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Goldfinch takes most readers 13 to 19 hours to finish.
The Goldfinch is a standalone novel by Donna Tartt, not part of a series.
The Goldfinch is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
