The Goldfinch is a novel by the American author Donna Tartt. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Published in 2013, it followed The Little Friend in 2002.

The Goldfinch follows 13-year-old Theodore Decker, and the dramatic changes his life undergoes after he survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother and results in him coming into possession of Carel Fabritius's painting The Goldfinch.

Tartt has stated that she had been wanting to write about Amsterdam for 20 years, having lived for some time in the city after the success of The Little Friend.

She was partly inspired to write The Goldfinch after hearing about the Taliban's destruction in 2001 of the historic statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. She says: "There was nothing to write about, there was not really a story – but there was an idea that something so beautiful, a light at the heart of the world, could be just taken away, destroyed, deliberately."

As a child, she used to make little books written around images taken from magazines; one of these featured a painting, a portrait of the Infanta by Velasquez. She says in interview: "With The Goldfinch, in some ways, I'm going back to those earliest construction-paper books and the childhood technique of choosing a picture and writing a story around it."

In the novel, Theo, having lost his mother to a terrorist attack, finds himself in possession of a small Dutch Golden Age painting called Het Puttertje (The Goldfinch). The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius (almost all of Fabritius's works were destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed). By an extraordinary coincidence: the Goldfinch painting, which is rarely exhibited outside of its country of origin, was shown in New York for a show at the Frick, opening on the very day The Goldfinch was published.

The Goldfinch is told in retrospective first-person narration by Theodore "Theo" Decker. Thirteen-year-old Theo's life is turned upside down when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces, including a favorite painting of hers, Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch. There, he becomes intrigued by a red-headed girl in the company of an elderly man. A bomb explodes in the museum, killing his mother and several other visitors.

In the rubble, Theo once more encounters the old man, who gives him a ring and delivers an enigmatic message before dying. Believing that the man is indicating The Goldfinch, Theo takes it during his panicked escape. He moves in with a school friend, Andy Barbour, and his wealthy family in their Park Avenue apartment. He carries out the old man's last wishes and returns the ring to his business partner, James "Hobie" Hobart. Theo learns that the old man's name was Welton "Welty" Blackwell, and that he and Hobie ran an antiques shop together. He becomes friends with Hobie and encounters the red-haired girl, Pippa, who lived with Welty and Hobie after her mother (Welty's half-sister) died of cancer.