If You Liked The Secret History, Read These Next

Camden College, New Hampshire, 1985. Three students — a dealer, a romantic, and a socialite — narrate the same events from incompatible perspectives, and the gap between their versions is where the novel lives. Ellis is deliberately cold where Tartt is warm, deliberately ugly where she is beautiful, and the effect is a campus novel that makes you feel the specific hollowness of privilege rather than its seduction. Less Known Than American Psycho and significantly better, this is the dark side of the coin that The Secret History represents — same world, opposite emotional temperature. Read it directly after Tartt and the contrast is the point.

Oxford, the 1920s. Charles Ryder falls in with Sebastian Flyte — beautiful, aristocratic, already drinking too much — and through him enters the world of Brideshead Castle and the Marchmain family. Waugh wrote this during the Second World War as an elegy for the English aristocratic world he'd spent his career satirising, and the ambivalence shows on every page: the beauty is real, the decay is real, and the novel holds both without resolving them. This is the novel The Secret History is in conversation with — the doomed friendship, the beautiful setting, the sense that everything is moving toward ruin and nobody can stop it. The original dark academia novel, written fifty years before the genre existed.

Nick Guest graduates from Oxford in 1983 and moves into the spare room of his university friend's family in Notting Hill. The family is wealthy, politically connected, and Thatcherite, and Nick — gay, bookish, in love with Henry James — navigates their world with the careful attention of someone who knows he is always a guest and never quite a member. Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for this novel and it deserved it: the prose is as beautiful as anything Tartt has written, the social observation is surgical, and the novel's treatment of the AIDS crisis in its final section is devastating in a way you don't see coming. The British cousin of The Secret History — same class anxiety, same gorgeous writing, same sense of a world about to end.

Two boys at a New England boarding school during the Second World War. Gene is studious and envious. Phineas is athletic and golden. What happens between them is the kind of thing that only makes sense inside the hothouse of an elite school — a moment of betrayal so small it barely registers, with consequences that shape the rest of their lives. Knowles published this in 1959 and it has never gone out of print. It's the direct ancestor of The Secret History — the same New England setting, the same examination of how envy and admiration blur into something darker, the same sense that the most dangerous place in the world is a beautiful school with too much time and not enough supervision. The novel Tartt read before writing hers.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in 18th century Paris with no scent of his own and a supernatural sense of smell. He becomes a perfumer's apprentice and eventually a murderer — killing young women to distill the essence of their scent into the perfect perfume. Süskind writes about obsession with the same patient precision that Tartt brings to murder, and the novel shares The Secret History's central premise: a brilliant, isolated person does something monstrous in pursuit of something beautiful, and the reader is pulled along by the quality of the prose. Published in Germany in 1985, translated into English in 1986, it has sold over twenty million copies. One of the great cult novels of the twentieth century and the most unexpected book on this list.

The comic counterpoint to everything else on this list. Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer at a provincial British university in the 1950s — hungover, broke, contemptuous of almost everyone around him, and desperately trying not to get fired. Amis wrote this as a satirical assault on the British academic world and the class system it maintained, and it remains the funniest campus novel in the language. The Secret History treats academic life as beautiful and dangerous. Lucky Jim treats it as absurd and slightly tragic. Both are right. If you've been reading dark academic fiction for a while and need to laugh, this is the novel. The chapter where Jim delivers a lecture while extremely drunk is one of the great comic sequences in British literature.

A Franciscan friar and his novice arrive at a medieval Italian monastery to attend a theological debate and find a series of murders connected to the monastery's forbidden library. Eco was a semiotician before he was a novelist, and The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery built on the premise that signs and symbols are as dangerous as weapons — that what a text means, and who controls that meaning, is worth killing for. It shares The Secret History's obsession with knowledge as both gift and curse, its claustrophobic institutional setting, and its sense that beauty and violence are not opposites. Published in 1980, translated in 1983, it sold over fifty million copies and made literary thrillers respectable. The most intellectually demanding book on this list and worth every page.

Tartt's third novel took eleven years to write and won the Pulitzer Prize. Theo Decker survives a bombing at a New York museum as a child and walks out with a small Dutch masterpiece — Fabritius's painting of a goldfinch — that he keeps hidden for the next decade as his life falls apart around him. Where The Secret History is cold and classical, The Goldfinch is sprawling and Dickensian — a coming-of-age novel, a love story, a meditation on art and loss and what objects mean to the people who love them. It's longer, warmer, and more conventional than her debut, and some readers prefer it for exactly those reasons. The natural next step after The Secret History, from the only author who could have written both.