At a Glance
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing at a New York art museum that kills his mother. In the chaos, he walks out with a small Dutch Golden Age painting — Carel Fabritius's 'The Goldfinch' — and spends the next fifteen years in a downward spiral of grief, addiction, and crime, unable to let the painting go. The novel is equal parts Dickensian adventure, grief memoir, and philosophical meditation on whether beauty justifies existence.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sold over one million copies in its first year and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Reignited debates about the place of plot-driven literary fiction — many critics argued the Pulitzer was undeserved; many readers argued the critics were wrong. One of the few contemporary novels that is simultaneously a bestseller and a serious work of literary philosophy.
Diction Profile
Literary and dense with sensory specificity — art historical vocabulary, furniture-making terminology, drug-culture argot, and social-class markers all coexist in a prose that is fundamentally Dickensian in its sweep
High