The Thirteenth Tale

For anyone who has ever had any aspiration to be a novelist, THIS is the book that will make you say, “That’s the kind of novel I want to write.” Mystery, romance, crazy relatives, windswept moors, creepy old houses – this book has everything and then some. And the fact that it’s a novel about a biographer/bookstore employee/avid reader invited to write the biography of a best-selling author makes it that much more appealing to booklovers like me.

I think the aspects of the book I like best are the ambiguities. The narrator, Margaret Lea, is an unmarried adult woman who works for her father in his bookstore, but I am not quite sure how old she is. Is she 25? 30? A 40-year-old spinster? It’s never clear to me. And the era is unclear as well. There are telephones and trains, but not a computer or cell phone in sight, and the author, Diane Setterfield, gives us no historical markers like wars to judge by. Margaret could be writing Miss Winter’s biography anytime between 1960 and 2010.

But those ambiguities serve to enhance the eternal nature of Miss Winter’s story of the Angelfield family, and I believe that is the point. It doesn’t matter when it happened, what matters is that this is a timeless mystery of family secrets and half-told tales, one I found almost impossible to put down.