The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel [Paperback]

Diane Setterfield (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 9, 2007

Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness -- featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.

There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."

She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."

"I am a biographer, I work with facts."

The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida's plan. The transformative power of truth informs the lives of both women by story's end, and The Thirteenth Tale is finally and convincingly told. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (October 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743298039
• ISBN-13: 978-0743298032
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,193 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diane Setterfield is a former academic, specializing in twentieth-century French literature. She lives in Yorkshire, England.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

715 of 743 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Enjoyable Read December 9, 2006

By Patrick Harrington

Format:Hardcover

I almost never review books on Amazon, but I just finished reading "The Thirteenth Tale" and logged onto Amazon to see if Diane Setterfield had written any other books and in the process browsed the existing reviews. I found that I could agree with neither the positive nor the negative reviews. A majority of the positive reviews simply fawn over the book without explaining why it is so good. Many of the reviews are filled with overworked hyperbole. Many of the negative reviews struck me as so vitriolic that I wonder if the reviewer had forgotten their meds before starting the review. And so, I decided to write a review. I'm not going to tell you whether it is a good or a bad book, I'm going to tell you if I liked it or not and why.

I enjoyed the book for the following reasons:

1. The plot interested me (see book description if you don't already know the plot).

2. The writing is excellent. Richly descriptive without being so wordy that I felt like skimming paragraphs.

3. I found the characters interesting, believable and well-developed.

4. The pacing of the story was just how I like it in a book of this genre. Slightly meandering with a steady rise and fall of tempo. This gives me plenty of exciting reading, but also allows me places to stop reading when I need to go to bed or do something else.

Is this book great literature? Hell, I don't know and don't care. I enjoyed reading it and that's what reading is all about for me.

581 of 608 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Debut September 14, 2006

By Mark Wakely VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

When a first novel is immediately (and enthusiastically) compared to the works of such literary luminaries as the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, a large dose of skepticism is in order. I read this book with a jaundiced eye, expecting to eventually uncover at least one unconvincing character, a plot twist that failed to surprise, or a passage less than vivid, unworthy of the masters.

I did not.

Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale carries the reader along like a turbulent river, with unexpected eddies and undertows you can't escape. The characters are absolutely true to the worlds of Dickens and Austen, but they're originals, not derivatives. They grieve and you do, they rejoice and you do, they die and you do- almost. The whole atmosphere of the book is powerful and sweeping, in the manner of Henry James or even Joseph Conrad. (Well, minus all those ships, of course.) If I had to pick one story that gave the same overall effect, I'd pick The Turn of the Screw, since the ghost element in Setterfield's book is equally shocking and unique, although James's classic novella lacks the grand span and scope of The Thirteenth Tale. Then again, Setterfield's characters could just as easily find a home in Dickens' dangerous London squalor or in the halls of a Bronte mansion, the air thick with secrets and heavy with troubled specters anxious to make themselves known.

Intriguing, daring and even downright heart-pounding at times, The Thirteenth Tale might well give you nightmares at the end, but they'll be the best- and most original- nightmares you've ever had.

-Mark Wakely, author of An Audience for Einstein

644 of 682 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Do you intend to tell me the truth?" September 12, 2006

By Tom S. TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Vida Winter, England's most famous and reclusive writer, is nearing the end, and before she goes she wants her amazing life story to be recorded for posterity. For this, she engages a lonely young biographer, Margaret Lea, who has a few secrets of her own. When these two forceful women meet, the stage is set for an ever-mounting series of shocking surprises.

I've always been a fan of the Gothic style of romantic mystery, and some of my favorite authors are the Brontës, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Stewart, and Robert Goddard. If you share my love of windswept moors, bleak houses and strange families, you're in for a real treat. THE THIRTEENTH TALE is a masterful, deliberately old-fashioned story of secrets, ghosts, sexual obsession, murder, madness--you name it, and it's here.

This is a beautiful book. I'm going to give copies to a few friends, and I plan to read it again. The only other books I've actually read twice are GREAT EXPECTATIONS, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and REBECCA. What else can I say? Enjoy.

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a praising, non-spoiler review September 21, 2006

By Carl V. Anderson

Format:Hardcover

It is a dark and stormy night as I write this. Or, to be more accurate, a dark and stormy morning. The weather reflects the exquisite melancholy that has settled itself upon me at the completion of The Thirteenth Tale. Diane Setterfield's debut novel is one of those all-too-rare stories that gets under your skin, that grabs hold of your imagination with both hands and won't let go.

I have cherised the reading of this book over the last week. All other books were set aside. When I wasn't reading The Thirteenth Tale, I was thinking about it, remembering it. I looked forward to those stolen moments when I might be able to read but a few pages as much as I did those hours that I could devote to the tale. I hung on every word and savored The Thirteenth Tale as one would a well-prepared meal. And now it has ended and, contrary to my normal habits I am not anxious to pick up the next story. I am not yet ready to move on.

To put it plainly, The Thirteenth Tale was bound to fail. It had to overcome the weight of considerable expectations. It seemed that everywhere I turned prior to its release someone or some thing was inducing me to buy this book. Comparisons to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca only served to heighten those expectations. And as I stood in the bookstore holding this beautiful volume in my hands (raised letter dust jacket with an image to make a book lover swoon, serrated pages that smelled of new paper and fresh ink, gold embossed designs on the spine of the book itself) my expectations were at a fever pitch.

As I read those first pages I was nervous. Diane Setterfield was obviously attempting to speak with the voice of her gothic ancestors a century or more gone. A few of the initial sentences worried me.... This style of writing seems always to be balanced on the edge of a precipice...one sentence fragment too many will tip it over that edge. I needn't have been concerned. Within a few pages it was apparent that Setterfield was a skilled performer. And really, if you think about it, she had an ace up her sleeve. Her protagonist, Margaret Lea, is a book lover. Sentences like:

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce you skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."

and

"I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book."

could be mantras for those of us who have shared our love of books of late. With the kindred spirit of the bibliophile I was willing and anxious to follow Margaret on her adventure. And what an adventure it was.

As I indicated at the beginning I will not spoil any part of the story for you. Simply put, The Thirteenth Tale is a grand novel in the gothic tradition. If you have read the book jacket you know that the story features a ghost, a grand old house, and family secrets. The novel allows us to witness the act of one person telling their story to another and in those moments Diane Setterfield's writing transports you to the very side of this storyteller, making you feel like the story is being told you and you alone. A delicious air of suspense pervades this story in both its revelation of the nature of evil and in its resolution of the various plot threads that are skillfully woven together by Setterfield.

The back inside flap of the book jacket promises that Setterfield will, "in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life". She keeps her promise. Read more ›