Kathmandu, May 16 -- Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' is one of those rare novels that completely earns its cult status. It is marketed as a murder mystery, yet reducing it to that genre feels almost unfair. The murder is revealed within the opening pages, and from that moment onward, the novel becomes less concerned with who committed the crime and far more interested in why people commit evil in the first place.

This book could easily have been a conventional thriller, but Tartt turned it into an unsettling psychological study of obsession, morality, beauty, and intellectual arrogance.

The novel's exceptional quality is its narration. Richard Papen is easily one of the most convincing unreliable narrators in modern fiction. He tells...