An explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art kills Audrey Decker while she and her 13-year-old son, Theo, pay an afternoon visit. Theo survives, but before he stumbles to safety, a wounded elderly man encourages him to steal the Museum’s 1654 Carel Fabritius painting of a goldfinch and to deliver a gold ring to the Hobart and Blackwell antiques shop. Thus begins an 800-page adventure involving Vegas gamblers, underworld criminals, and Park Avenue privilege.

THE GOLDFINCH is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.