The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch is a novel by the American writer Donna Tartt, published in 2013. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2014.

Thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an explosion that kills his mother, and in the wreckage he takes away a small painting she had shown him, Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch. Over the decade that follows, the painting is both a burden and a promise: he is taken in by the family of a friend, moved to Las Vegas by a father who had left, taught to deal in furniture by an older companion, and drawn into a world where the value of such an object is measured in ways he only gradually understands. Tartt has said that the idea behind the book came to her partly from the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and from her sense that something beautiful at the centre of the world can simply be taken away.

The novel moves between New York, Las Vegas and Amsterdam, and its long first-person narration is Ted's own attempt to account for what he did with what he carried out of the museum.