LiterariLeigh

"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?" 

~Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

I often start a new book still thinking about the last one I read, hoping that this one will soon engage me anew with it's story. Oftentimes, the new book will cause me to reflect on or compare a previous read. In Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, I found a highly pleasurable Gothic familiarity, but with enough twists and turns to make it distinctive.

Margaret Lea works in her father's antiquarian bookstore and sometimes writes biographies about rather obscure writers. One day, a letter arrives from world famous author Vida Winter asking Margaret to be her biographer, although Margaret has never read any of her novels. But on a sleepless night, Margaret reads a rare copy of Winter's Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, and finds herself not only enchanted by  the book, but also perplexed that there are only twelve stories. Drawn by a mysterious connection, Margaret pursues Vida's strange and astonishing life story- only is it truth or fiction? This vivid and complex mystery was just a delight to read.