The Secret History

A meandering psychological thriller; the intensity lags in places (I spent some 50 pages wondering if I had already made it past the real climax of the novel). But the book's acclaim is well-deserved if only on the basis of its gripping set of characters, a particularly impressive feat, given their essential unlikability and the distance between the narrator, Richard Papen, and the college friends he never seems to truly know. (Whether he knows himself and presents himself honestly is yet another open question.) A book I will likely still be thinking about for some time.