Vida Winter, a bestselling yet reclusive novelist, has created many outlandish life histories for herself, all of them invention. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to biographer Margaret Lea - a woman with secrets of her own - is a summons. Vida's tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling, but as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction and she doesn't trust Vida's account. As she begins her researches, two parallel stories unfold. Join Margaret as she begins her journey to the truth - hers, as well as Vida's.
My initial reaction to this book was that it reminded me a lot of Kate Morton. I have been a fan of her work for years, though I haven’t reviewed any here, and she has a way of writing mysteries that is thrilling and all-consuming. The Thirteenth Tale is much the same; Setterfield sets up a historical mystery early on and continually weaves separate threads of the story.
I absolutely love this kind of historical fiction with a mystery element. I adore historical fiction, but even more than that, I love deep, dark family secrets. (I’m not sure why… my family has none that I know of!) The Thirteenth Tale is about two women, Margaret Lea and Vida Winter, and both have a dark, twisty past that makes for riveting reading. There are twins: multiple sets of twins. There are ghosts. There is a wicked governess. There are sadistic, mentally deranged parents. It is something out of a Gothic novel; more to the point, The Thirteenth Tale is almost entirely convincing as a Gothic novel itself.
