The story that Richard Papen has to tell is of a year at a New England college that changed his life forever. His class-driven yearning for social privilege and intellectual rigour is fulfilled when he is accepted into the college's élite inner circle: five students, sophisticated and self-assured, chosen by the inspiring and charismatic professor of classics to debate aesthetics and to search for truth through the discipline of his beloved Ancient Greek.

During the autumn term, they spend deliciously idle weekends in an old country house, reading, boating or just lazing in the sun of the Indian summer. Charmed by the intimacy of this group, Richard is at first unaware of the shadow cast over them by a past crime in which they all colluded. But once he is taken into their confidence, slowly and inevitably they realize that they must silence the one member of their circle who might betray their terrible secret.

Chronicling the spiral fall from innocence of young scholars, Donna Tartt's remarkable novel seducces with its storytelling and its erudition. The Secret History is a richly textured, hypnotic novel of gilded youth corrupted by its own moral arrogance.