The Thirteenth Tale

"I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must me said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearn for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one every expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again-the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me"- The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, is the story of a world famous author known for her mystery as much as her writing. Aging and sick, Vida Winter decides to finally open up about the mystery of her life and share the truth of her past, and choses to do so with biographer Margaret Lea. Driven by the ghosts of her own past, Lea reluctantly agrees to work with Miss Winter, and together the women confront their secrets.
It was phenomenal. It was magical and beautifully poetic. Twenty pages in, I knew that I loved it. I had hardly any idea what the story was going to be, but the writing in itself already had me hooked. I wanted to read it during every spare minute that I had and when I had less than 100 pages left, I was sorry it was going to end.
As a reader, I love language. I love words that roll beautifully off the tongue. In The Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield creates music with her word choice, and I found myself rereading sentences out loud just because I loved the sound of them. Both the writing and the story were captivating, and very Jane Eyre-esque. It filled you with questions and remained steadily unpredictable. When I got my answers, I wanted to start over from the beginning to piece it all together.
I fell in love with The Thirteenth Tale. It is one of those books that you need to mourn the end of. One where you cannot begin a new book, because you are still lost in its world. It is a story that will stay with you for a very long time.