num_pages: 624
description: Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The 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.
language: English
title: The Little Friend
titlecomplete: The Little Friend
characters: Hely, Harriet Dufresnes, Ida Rhew, Danny Ratliff, Charlotte Cleve, Libby Cleve, Edie Cleve, Allison Dufresnes
genres: Fiction, American, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 66498
places: Alexandria, Mississippi
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: WH Smith Literary Award
publisher: Random House Inc