The Secret History

"This was the first novel by Donna Tartt. It famously took her many, many years to write. It’s set at a small exclusive college in New England – probably at Bennington, although that’s not what she calls it – where a student shows up who’s an outsider. He comes from suburban California, and he somehow finds his way into this clique of students who have gathered around a very influential professor of classics. Together, they plumb the mysteries of the ancient world, which leads to them reenacting cultic rituals and strange phenomena and violent behaviour. They go down the rabbit hole of dark academia, and that turns out to be a very scary and dangerous place. It’s something of a thriller, and something of a mystery, but also written with a great amount of literary flair. It’s held up as one of the early novels that is difficult to classify as literary or genre, and it was wildly popular with people like me who find the trappings of reading and learning – the libraries and all the rest of it – unbelievably appealing. There’s a question at the heart of the book about whether they have summoned supernatural forces, which have taken possession of them and wrought evil around them, or whether the darkness came from inside them. It’s a question that Tartt wisely leaves unresolved."

"It’s about a group of students on an elite New England university campus. As with some of the other books, you’ve got someone who is slightly on the outside, in this case, the narrator, Richard. He finds himself accidentally at this university. There is a group of students who are assigned to a particular professor, and he wants in on the group. It’s about cliques and being an outsider and then being allowed on the inside. Those themes are so universal for anyone who’s ever been to school or college that they really speak to you as a reader. We know from the outset that one of their group is dead and that they are responsible. So this isn’t like some of the other books, where you don’t know who’s going to die or who the perpetrators are. You know that from the opening line. So the joy and the pleasure in this book is watching it unfold. It’s about the group dynamics and how those play out and change and allegiances shift throughout the course of the novel. I love dysfunctional group dynamics. I guess in fiction we like exploring extremes that we hope not to explore in real life. It’s a way of working through the emotional and psychological hypotheticals of those situations. What would I do in that situation? How would I feel? It’s a safe way of thinking through and feeling those experiences, precisely because you hope they’re not going to happen to you. Also, if you think about kids in the playground and that taunt of, ‘I know something you don’t know.’ At the heart of all these novels is something you don’t know that you desperately want to find out. That’s what makes them all such compelling and propulsive page-turners. It’s more relatable. There’s something very escapist about reading an Ian Fleming book about James Bond’s escapades. But it’s not as empathetic or emotionally fulfilling as reading any of the novels on this list."