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Diane Setterfield

Author of The Thirteenth Tale

5 Works 20,993 Members 1,244 Reviews 60 Favorited

About the Author

Works by Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale (2006) 17,127 copies
Once Upon a River (2018) 2,455 copies
Bellman & Black (2013) 1,363 copies

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2007 (89) 2008 (76) adult (61) audiobook (118) authors (73) book club (116) books (202) books about books (241) British (137) contemporary fiction (73) death (78) diane setterfield (66) ebook (73) England (475) family (155) fantasy (141) favorites (73) fiction (2,113) ghosts (166) goodreads (61) gothic (654) gothic fiction (59) historical (93) historical fiction (418) Kindle (88) literary fiction (75) literature (87) magical realism (107) mystery (1,101) novel (205) own (134) read (282) secrets (90) sisters (146) storytelling (78) suspense (149) to-read (1,508) twins (524) unread (90) writers (87)

Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Diane Setterfield
Birthdate
1964-08-22
Gender
female
Nationality
UK
Birthplace
Reading, Berkshire, England, UK
Places of residence
Reading, Berkshire, England, UK
Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, UK
Education
Bristol University (French Literature)
Occupations
teacher
author
Agent
Vivien Green (Sheil Land)
Short biography
Diane Setterfield (born 22 August 1964) is a British author whose 2006 debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, became a New York Times No. 1 best-seller. she won the 2007 Quill Award, Debut author of the year, for this novel. It is written in the Gothic tradition, with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The rights were acquired by David Heyman at Heyday Films and the novel was adapted for television by Christopher Hampton. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Olivia Colman, and Sophie Turner, The Thirteenth Tale was televised on BBC2 in December 2013.

Diane Setterfield's second novel, Bellman & Black, was published in 2013 by Emily Bestler Books/Atria in the United States and by Orion in the UK. Her third novel, Once Upon A River, was published in 2018.

Before writing, Setterfield studied French Literature at The University of Bristol, earning a bachelor of arts in 1986 and a PhD in 1993.[6] Setterfield's PhD is on "autobiographical structures in André Gide's early fiction." Setterfield taught at numerous schools as well as privately before leaving academia in the late 1990s.

Setterfield lives in Oxford, England.

Members

Discussions

The Thirteenth Tale: Middles (SPOILERS) in The 11 in 11 Category Challenge (February 2011)
The Thirteenth Tale: Endings (SPOILERS) in The 11 in 11 Category Challenge (February 2011)
The Thirteenth Tale: Beginnings (SPOILERS) in The 11 in 11 Category Challenge (February 2011)
The Thirteenth Tale: General Thread in The 11 in 11 Category Challenge (February 2011)

Reviews

This one of my favorite books. I don't re-read books very often. This is one of the few that would make the list. This book has been reviewed about 3000 times, so I'm not going to add more to the pile. I will just stay I recommend this book to all book lovers no matter what genre you prefer. A+
 
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gpangel | 909 other reviews | Mar 11, 2024 |
Well written. As a ghost story, a bit on the subtle & psychologica sidel . Enjoyed the period detail about both the mill & the funerary business.
 
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cspiwak | 167 other reviews | Mar 6, 2024 |
Certainly an homage to classic Victorian/ goth like the brontes and Wilkie Collins. Bit flowers in the Atticish for me.
 
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cspiwak | 909 other reviews | Mar 6, 2024 |
Diane Setterfield draws misty trails across her stories in ways that both obscure and illuminate, challenging her readers to uncover the truth she writes. Her settings are the otherworldly that sit opaquely on top of a solid reality and her characters draw a reader in through fascination and curiousity. She is a master of language. I first encountered her work through The Thirteenth Tale and then in rel="nofollow" target="_top">Bellman and Black, the former of which I liked more than the latter, and I bought Once Upon a River several years ago in order to once again immerse myself in her work. And then as is common with books I buy, it languished, unread, on my shelf for literal years, until now, when I picked up this unsettling, dreamy, and immersive fairy tale of a story about the power of storytelling and want and loss.

In 1887, on the evening of the winter Solstice, at The Swan, a rural inn on the banks of the River Thames, as a public room full of people drank and listened to the publican's storytelling, a man three quarters frozen through, and dripping river water, burst into the room carrying the body of a four year old girl and promptly collapsed. The child had drowned and was beyond help but the man could still be saved. Rita, a local nurse, was called to assist with the unconscious man. She saw the body of the child and confirmed to herself by all measures that the small girl was dead, only to then witness the girl come back to life with a gasp. The man who saved her regains consciousness but has no idea who the child is, leading to confusion and speculation. Was she the missing child of the Vaughns, wealthy local landowners whose baby was kidnapped several years before? Was she missing daughter of a thief from a local farming family who disapeared when her mother died by suicide and was last seen being led to the river before her mother's death? Was she the young sister of the parson's cleaning lady? Each of these three possibilities diverge and then come together just as the River Thames and its tributaries meander toward the sea. Each of these missing girl stories is like a tributary of the great river--sometimes taking over and sometimes meandering slowly like a trickle but always weaving inexorably back to the main story. There is a fourth, and supernatural, possibiliy as well. Could this mute child be the daughter of Quietly the boatman who is said to haunt this stretch of the river? Threaded through these larger tales are smaller stories that also flow into the greater story, that of Daunt, the photographer who saved the girl and who finds himself falling in love with his nurse; that of the local farmer, the son of royalty and a Black maid, who has created his own wonderful, much loved family; and that of the solitary, haunted woman who cleans for the parson, keeping quiet about the history of abuse she has suffered and continues to suffer.

The line between the realistic and the supernatural is a thin one and this story straddles it well with its slowly rising tension, its lush descriptions, the ongoing question of the child's identity, and the hypnotic feel of the prose itself. In the person of the reanimated little girl and the various characters' great desire for her to be their missing child, all of the characters are all faced with the secrets and heavy guilt each carries. Setterfield has taken a complex plot, stirred in elements of magical realism, Victorian sensibilities, the hold of superstition, and questions of belonging and identity in this paean to the power and importance of storytelling. The ending of this mesmerizing tale starts to come apart a bit, as if the answer to the question of the child's identity must be hurried along so that all of the other plot threads could be neatly tied up too. Despite this oddly curtailed conclusion after so many pages of slowly heightening the suspense, the story as a whole was an engrossing one that keeps a reader turning the pages hoping for the truth, or at least a satisfying resolution to each of the major and minor story lines.… (more)
½
 
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whitreidtan | 162 other reviews | Feb 27, 2024 |

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Statistics

Works
5
Members
20,993
Popularity
#1,032
Rating
3.9
Reviews
1,244
ISBNs
180
Languages
21
Favorited
60

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