From the New York Times:
DONNA TARTT
“The Goldfinch” (Little, Brown)
Ms. Tartt’s best-selling novel is about a boy who comes into possession of a painting after an explosion at a museum.
In a phone conversation on Monday, Ms. Tartt, 50, said the novel “was always about a child who had stolen a painting,” but it was only two years into writing the book that she saw “The Goldfinch,” a 17th-century work by Carel Fabritius.
“It fit into the plot of the book I was writing in ways I couldn’t have imagined,” she said. “It had to be a small painting that a child could carry, and that a child could be obsessed by.”
Finalists Philipp Meyer, “The Son”; Bob Shacochis, “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul.”
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