Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel following Theo Decker after a museum bombing is The Goldfinch.
Published in 2013, the novel begins when Theo survives an explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the aftermath, he takes a small Dutch Golden Age painting, The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius. The artwork becomes a powerful object in his life as he moves through grief, foster care, friendship, art dealing, and criminal intrigue.
The novel won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Tartt’s story combines a coming-of-age narrative with a meditation on beauty, trauma, guilt, and the value of art.
The title refers to Fabritius’s 1654 painting, not to a fictional artwork created for the book. The painting is real and is held by the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. A 2019 film adaptation starred Ansel Elgort as Theo.