The Thirteenth Tale – Diane Setterfield

Margaret Lea works quietly in her father’s antiquarian bookshop in Cambridge, finding solace in the pages of nineteenth-century biographies and keeping the modern world at arm’s length. Her solitary routine is shattered when she receives an unexpected letter from Vida Winter—Britain’s most famous and fiercely reclusive novelist, who has spent six decades fabricating contradictory stories about her past. Now gravely ill and nearing the end of her life, Winter has finally decided to tell the truth, and she has chosen Margaret to write her biography.

Summoned to Winter’s isolated Yorkshire estate, Margaret is drawn into a haunting gothic tale of twin sisters, a crumbling family mansion, dark obsessions, and a devastating fire that left secrets buried in the ashes. As Margaret pieces together the fragments of Vida Winter’s extraordinary life, she is forced to confront the ghosts of her own family history in this richly atmospheric, spellbinding mystery about the power of storytelling.