Recommendations
Books Like The Little Friend
Best books to read after The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is a Southern Gothic novel about a girl investigating her brother's unsolved murder in 1970s Mississippi. These recommendations extend the experience through Tartt's other novels, other Southern Gothic fiction, and other novels about children carrying a grief their families cannot process.
- 1Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's debut — a group of classics students at a Vermont college who commit a murder; more immediately gripping than The Little Friend, the natural starting point for Tartt readers.
- 2Buy
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's Pulitzer-winning third novel — a boy who takes a painting from a terrorist attack; shares The Little Friend's interest in childhood grief and the way catastrophe shapes a whole life.
- 3Buy
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Another Alabama childhood, another violent injustice seen through a child's eyes — the most direct predecessor to The Little Friend's combination of Southern Gothic atmosphere, childhood perspective, and moral outrage.
- 4Buy
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's stories are the canonical reference point for Southern Gothic — darkly comic, morally serious, populated by grotesque characters and sudden violence; the tradition The Little Friend belongs to.
- 5Buy
Mystic River
by Dennis Lehane
Three Boston men whose lives were altered by a childhood crime — the same preoccupation as The Little Friend with a violent event in childhood that shapes everything afterward.
- 6Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Five daughters and the neighborhood boys who observe them from outside — another novel about an inexplicable event from childhood that the observers spend their lives trying to understand.
- 7Buy
Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's debut novel — a young man from rural Georgia founding a church without Christ; the fullest expression of the Southern Gothic religious grotesque that The Little Friend draws on.
- 8Buy
Sharp Objects
by Gillian Flynn
A journalist returns to her small town to cover the murders of two girls — Southern Gothic noir in the tradition of The Little Friend, organized around a woman trying to understand what happened in a place that damaged her.
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