A thirteen-year-old boy who loses his mother in a museum bombing and spends the next fifteen years failing to recover, succeeding at fraud, loving the wrong people, and refusing to abandon a painting that defines his existence. He is self-aware, unreliable, often wrong, and occasionally brilliant. His love of beauty is the most authentic thing about him — and the thing that causes the most damage. Tartt gives him the full complexity of a real person: charming and self-destructive, clear-eyed about his flaws and unable to correct them.