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Loading... The Thirteenth Tale (2006)| 15,534 | 862 | 260 | 
(3.99) | 4 / 1040 | When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales. |
▾LibraryThing Recommendations   59 2norabelle414: Both gothic novels, with a big ol' creepy house, and theme of hidden family secrets Voracious_Reader: Both beautiful, almost Gothic tales told through the eyes of precocious unusual young women. 521 Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (ladybug74)392 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (brightbel, coffee.is.yum, caflores)253 The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (391)160 The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton (starfishian)141 The Distant Hours by Kate Morton (library_gal, Becchanalia)Becchanalia: Pretty much the same plot, secrets, family ties and tragedy set in the ancestral home. 164 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (rstaedter)101 The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry (avisannschild)124 Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (sruszala, lahochstetler)lahochstetler: Gothic tales of devoted twin sisters, love, and death. 1811 The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (starfishian, rmjp518, kethonna, elizabeth.a.coates)elizabeth.a.coates: Both centre around books/literature, both are eloquently written, both have an element of mystery 70 Affinity by Sarah Waters (Citizenjoyce)Citizenjoyce: The ambiance is the same. Both stories draw the reader in with promises of deeper mysteries to solve. 50 Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (akblanchard)akblanchard: Isolated old ladies benefit by telling their stories to younger women. 61 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (Becchanalia)Becchanalia: More creepy siblings and a misguided governess 50 Florence and Giles by John Harding (shelfoflisa)105 Atonement by Ian McEwan (julie_e_meyer)50 The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (amyblue, kethonna)73 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (lahni)84 The Woman in White Part One by Wilkie Collins (caflores)20 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (BookshelfMonstrosity)BookshelfMonstrosity: These novels offer gothic suspense's classic creepy atmosphere, though with somewhat different story-lines. Fingersmith takes place in Victorian England while The Thirteenth Tale is contemporary, but both emphasize books, mysteries about birth and identity, insanity, and grand houses.… (more) 20 The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh (ForeignCircus)
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| Epigraph |
All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story. -Vida Winter, Tales of Change and Desperation  | |
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| Dedication |
In memory
Ivy Dora and Fred Harold Morris
Corina Ethel and Ambrose Charles Setterfield | |
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It was November. | |
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Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. - Vida Winter Tell me the truth. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eye over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so. … ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection … So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself. . . . she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears . . . . It was the sound of joy. He married her for it. . . . But in her disease was a distillation: The more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence. Every time I saw her she seemed diminished: thinner, frailer, more transparent, and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her center was revealed. . . . when I read about kindly grandmothers in my books, I supply them with her face. “I know.” He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did. People disappear when they die. Their voice, their language, 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 there 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. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (1)
▾Book descriptions When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth itself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
All children mythologize their birth...
So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist.
The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself — all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.
As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.
Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.
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| Haiku summary |
The bond between twins
Long-held family secrets
A ruined old house
(passion4reading) | |
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The Thirteenth Tale: Middles (SPOILERS)
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Vida Winter is a world-famous author and gifted storyteller, but the one story she refuses to tell is her own. Her past is a tightly-locked secret that no one has been able to touch — until now. Now, with a terminal illness numbering her days, Vida Winter is ready to tell the truth.
A ghost story and a mystery, a tale about the magic of books and stories, about haunting secrets and untold truths, and the connections that bind people together. (