An extremely rare first edition of the Goldfinch, signed by Donna Tartt at a very friendly price. Because, why not?
Donna Tartt’s vast, feverish, Pulitzer-winning novel begins with an explosion in a museum and follows Theo Decker outward through grief, obsession, art, inheritance, fraud, friendship, addiction, wealth, beauty and the long afterlife of one catastrophic moment. At the centre is Carel Fabritius’s tiny painting of a chained bird, an image that becomes less a symbol than a wound Theo carries around with him: stolen object, sacred object, evidence, burden, curse, consolation.
This is the kind of big contemporary novel that behaves like an old-world object: ornate, obsessive, morally tangled, slightly ridiculous, occasionally ravishing, and completely committed to its own atmosphere. Tartt writes with that strange, high-control intensity where beauty and danger keep getting mistaken for one another. A very good fit for readers who like literary fiction with actual plot, art-world doom, haunted adolescence, dark glamour, emotional wreckage, and sentences that have clearly been handled with tweezers by someone frighteningly patient.
US first edition, first printing, published by Little, Brown and Company in October 2013. Hardcover with dust jacket. Signed by Donna Tartt on the half-title/title area. Publisher’s “signed copy” sticker to front jacket. Good used condition overall: light shelf wear and handling to jacket, some rubbing/creasing to extremities and corners, mild bumping, clean internally, binding sound.
