The Little Friend

Written by Donna Tartt

Years after a boy's unsolved murder, his young sister sets out to find the killer.

3.5 Goodreads · 88,023 ratings

640 pages· 218,604 words

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Bookroo's summary

In Alexandria, Mississippi, nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes is found hanged from a tree in his family's yard on Mother's Day. Twelve years later the crime is still unsolved and the family has never recovered. His fiercely determined younger sister, Harriet, raised on Kipling and Stevenson, decides to unmask the killer, a quest that leads her into danger.

From the publisher

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. - "Destined to become a special kind of classic." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother's Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents' yard. Twelve years later Robin's murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin's sister Harriet--unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town's rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family's history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and "a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens" (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

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