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Editors' Pick: Chosen as one of the Top 50 Books of 2006. See more editors' picks and customers' favorites for the year in our Best Books of 2006 store.
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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.
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
It was November. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
thirteenth tale, twin language, topiary garden Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Miss Winter, Vida Winter, Jane Eyre, Miss Lea, George Angelfield, Angelfield House, Thirteen Tales, Margaret Lea, Wuthering Heights, Miss Emmeline, Adeline March, Isabelle Angelfield, Miss March, John Digence, Fred Jameson, Banbury Herald, Aurelius Love, Miss Barrow, Christmas Eve, Keep Out, Hester Barrow New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
It was November. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
thirteenth tale, twin language, topiary garden Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Miss Winter, Vida Winter, Jane Eyre, Miss Lea, George Angelfield, Angelfield House, Thirteen Tales, Margaret Lea, Wuthering Heights, Miss Emmeline, Adeline March, Isabelle Angelfield, Miss March, John Digence, Fred Jameson, Banbury Herald, Aurelius Love, Miss Barrow, Christmas Eve, Keep Out, Hester Barrow New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 1
book:
- The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford World's Classics) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on page 303
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