Worth the wait, but not in gold

EVEN before it was published, with a whopping initial print run of 300,000 in America alone, Donna Tartt's new novel was talked of as a “To Kill a Mockingbird” for our times. That a publisher should be so lucky. Harper Lee's slim Pulitzer-prize winning novel about racial injustice was picked up by three American book clubs almost as soon as it came out in the summer of 1960. Although the story was set in the 1930s, the gathering civil-rights storm gave it a critical contemporary resonance. In its first year, “To Kill a Mockingbird” sold 2.5m copies. By the time its second anniversary rolled around, it had been on the American bestseller lists for 100 weeks.