The Little Friend

The Little Friend is the second novel by the American author Donna Tartt. The novel was initially published by Alfred A. Knopf on October 22, 2002, a decade after her first novel, The Secret History. The Little Friend follows a young girl, Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, living in Mississippi in the early 1970s. The story revolves around the unexplained death of Harriet's brother, Robin, who died by hanging in 1964 at the age of nine. The aftermath of this early tragedy, as well as the dynamics of Harriet's extended family serves as the principal focus of the novel, which explores a broad spectrum of perspectives and aspects of Southern life. In an interview with The Guardian in 2002, Tartt stated that The Little Friend was intentionally different from The Secret History, stating: "I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The Secret History was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War and Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form."