Di4Books

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

by Diane Setterfield

“The Thirteenth Tale pulls you in within a few pages. We are readers, so of course when the heroine Margaret Lea is working in her father's shop which is filled with old books is asked to be the biographer of Vida Winter, an incredibly prolific but extremely private writer, we know we are "home". We are in the land of books and stories and hazy afternoons that laze before us begging us to read. The walls and walls of bookshelves are to us, not a dark and serious decorating scheme, but a challenge. Who amongst us has not had that childhood fantasy of reading every single book in the library!!!!

As Vida tells her tale, Margaret is compelled to verify facts and interpret meanings which takes her from her father's shop to Miss Winter's home to the home in which Miss Winter grew up. The novel has a gothic feel about it, but never actually lets the reader know the time in which the book takes place. Think about that. Yes, there are clues...mention of a telephone here, electricity there...but the point is that the time is an irrelevent part of the setting and the setting is so beautifully and intricately described that the reader is transported into the thick of the story, its characters and its inherent mystery. When I say mystery, please don't click away and say, "I don't like mysteries." I don't particularly like mysteries if I'm supposed to figure out "whodunit" and at the end everything is tied up in a nice package. This is a mystery through which you meander, picking up a stone or a piece of glass in every word or action. Together the stones and pieces of glass become a piece of art that will leave you satisfied and musing over the book for days.”