The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: thirteenth tale, twin language, topiary garden, Miss Winter, Vida Winter, Jane Eyre (more...)

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

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.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Atria; First Edition. Edition edition (September 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743298020
• ISBN-13: 978-0743298025
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (718 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #27,475 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

516 of 543 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. "filmfan3" (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

407 of 429 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Mark Wakely (Lombard, Illinois) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

92 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Storytelling, January 24, 2007

By	Marion "[e-mail]" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I picked this book up on the advice of a good reading friend. It started out a tad slowly for my taste and I put it down several times, but by the time I had read about five chapters, I was totally engrossed in the twisting, turning, compelling subterfuge of Vida Winters' storytelling and the tale of her life as a twin with a crazy mother & *uncle*. The twins aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, either, but I don't want to give away too much. . . I hate it when a review gives away the plot!!

The plot was excellent and well-paced. The ending tied up all loose ends and left me with the contented feeling of having read a fine Victorian mystery novel. I highly recommend this book if you haven't read a "different" sort of mystery in a while. It's a fabulous tale, well told. What more could any reader want?