Book Review: “The Thirteenth Tale”

Having read thousands of books in my lifetime, “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield is among my top-five favorites.

It was a chance reading as my sister-in-law sent me this book for Christmas. I probably would not have purchased this book myself because it really isn’t my style. So let me first say a big “thank you” to her.

The “Thirteenth Tale” is an attention-grabbing, multi-layered mystery rich in secrets, tragedies and family troubles. Margaret Lea, a biographer, works in her family’s antique bookstore along with her father. She has been surrounded by beautifully written books her entire life and her love of them speaks to my own heart. Margaret has been contacted by a famous aging British mystery writer, Vida Winter, to write her biography.

The challenge lies in getting the truth out of Ms. Winter as she has told 19 different versions of her life story to the press over the years. No one is sure where the truth lies.

The reader is pulled into a twisting story of lies, family tragedy and confused identities set within a background of a foreboding ancestral home full of its own secrets and ghosts.

Margaret Lea struggles with her own demons while painstakingly uncovering Vida Winter’s “true” life.

This book was beautifully written and well paced. I was captivated by the many twists and turns in the plot as well as many unexpected plot changes. I truly enjoyed how the author described Margaret Lea’s love and genuine appreciation of books. It was like she was describing me! In the following excerpt, the author describes how the written word lives on even though their author is no longer of this world.

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some their is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

The “Thirteen Tale” is Diane Setterfield’s first novel and, hopefully, this is the start of many more to come. It’s hard to believe that she produced such a profound story the first time around but as the saying goes “If you got it, you got it.”

Setterfield is a former academic, who specializd in 20th French literature. She lives in Yorkshire, England.

Jennifer Kacprowicz is the owner of Secondhand Pages and can be reached at [email protected].

Photo by RuthAnn Hogue