The Thirteenth Tale moves back and forth from Miss Winter’s recollections to Margaret’s interpretations, from Margaret’s imaginings to Margaret’s own research about Miss Winter, and from two twinned Yorkshire manors, one now home to Vida Winter, the other destroyed by fire several decades before. As Margaret listens, she recalls her own mysterious origins, her own missing twin, and her own family silences about the past. Miss Winter describes a childhood that no previous biographer has ever known, one involving a peculiar and precocious set of twins, their gardener and their governess, and an isolated upbringing on another country estate bounded by the Yorkshire moors. Almost immediately the past and present intertwine. Margaret Lea travels to Vida Winter’s estate, meets the famous author, and begins to listen to an amazing series of revelations. The story begins when a reclusive best-selling novelist invites a bookish spinster to write her authorized biography. If you are a reader who enjoys old-fashioned Gothic novels, set on the Yorkshire moors in an aging English mansion and filled with mysterious instances and innuendos, The Thirteenth Tale was written just for you. Imagine Daphne du Maurier, sipping absinthe and smoking pot, while rereading Jane Eyre and rewriting The Turn of the Screw! That is precisely my impression of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale.
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