Saturday, 13 May 2017

The Thirteenth Tale, book review. (Diane Setterfield)

I thought this book would be good before I turned the first page, it just had that certain something about it; I wasn't wrong.
Diane Setterfield's, The Thirteenth Tale, is a book about redemption, death, and a great deception.
A letter, hand written, by the world renown author, Vida Winter, summonses little known biographer, Margaret Lea, to take her deposition, her thirteenth tale. A tale of incest, madness, and feral children, of a dark family past, and the long kept secrets of her days as a child, growing up at Angelfield house, a house now lost to nature after fire tore through it.
The book is spooky in places - when Margaret takes a sneaky look around the now derelict Angelfield house, she encounters a man living in the squalid remains, and we feel her heart racing, as she attempts her escape.
As her relationship develops with Vida Winter - who is very ill - there is an atmosphere and suspense, that I liken to Kate Mosse's Languedoc series, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's, Shadow of the Wind trilogy, and is something I actively seek out in books now.
The novel is told in the first person by both Margaret Lea and Vida Winter, and Vida isn't the only one who has something to hide!
As Margaret deposes more and more of her notes, and the interviews with Vida continue, it brings into question things in her past; things that have remained buried for years, and Diane Setterfield's clever prose, drip feed you just enough information to keep you intrigued, guessing, and reading to the end.
Great atmosphere then, well written, absorbing characters and a great twist. Four and a half well deserved stars.


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