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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. Margaret has a story of her own: she was one of conjoined twins and her sister died so that Margaret could live. She feels an otherworldly aura sometimes or a yearning for a part of her that is forever missing. Vida's story involves two wild girls--feral twins (is she one of them?)--who would have been better off being suckled by wolves. Instead, their mother and uncle, involved in things too unsavory to contemplate, combine to neglect them woefully. There's also a governess, a Doctor, a kindly housekeeper, a gardener, and another presence--a very strange presence--which Margaret perceives as a ghost at first. Making obeisance to other great ghost stories, there is a deadly fire, a beautiful old house gone to ruin, and always that presence.... 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
 Customer Reviews 
The 13th Tale
Rating: 5
A little slow to start, but before you know it, you are totally engrossed and cannot put the book down. Very interesting, gothic type novel that won't dissapoint at the end. Lots of very strange characters, indeed.
Stories within stories within stories!
Rating: 5
Dickensian in depth, scope and grandeur with the feminine overtones of Bronte's "Jane Eyre", staunchly upper crust British in its attitudes and values, Victorian in flavour and yet deliciously undated and entirely timeless, Diane Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" is a spectacularly modern gothic murder mystery that will thrill its readers from first page to last. Truly enjoyable literary fiction without the stuffiness or pretentiousness so typical of this genre!
Vida Winters is a reclusive best selling novelist whose personal history has never been told. Actually, that's not quite right ... it has been told on numerous occasions! But it's never been the same story - nineteen journalists have had their chains yanked with nineteen thoroughly different stories, each of which was wilder and more patently false than the other eighteen! So when Margaret Lea, a little known biographer and the daughter of a quietly successful antiquarian book-seller received a letter from Ms Winters asking her to attend at her country estate to prepare her life story, Ms Lea had scant reason to believe that the famous author was actually prepared to tell her the truth!
But the story was told and what a story it was - an astonishing mysterious tale of a dysfunctional wealthy family, twins, insanity, murder, ghosts, abandoned infants, incestuous love, arson and more. And conveyed by an author whose command of her craft is all the more surprising and compelling for its being a debut novel! Setterfield's masterful prose, to steal one of her own phrases, will wash over its readers in an explosion of "vertiginous, kaleidoscopic brilliance".
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
Will it ever end!?!?!?
Rating: 1
Alright, so I'm trying my best to finish this book. I have about 75 pages left and it's so boring I just want to give up! I've read 100 pages and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED!!! When I'm into a book this far, I usually always try and at least finish it but this is torture. I keep thinking something is going to happen, but it just doesn't.
UGH!!!
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