The Thirteenth Tale

I’d read and enjoyed Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon A River, so I was excited to read The Thirteenth Tale. The opening setting is a used-book shop in Cambridge, which was already a win for me. Since lockdown, when walking to the bodega for milk is about the  furthest I go, I’ve been even more in love with fictional travel. The Beach brought me back to expat bars in Asia, Gaudy Night to the rituals of Oxbridge lectures, Cobble Hill was an exaggerated Brooklyn. I’d spent a fair amount of my Cambridge session visiting used book stores, so I loved the moments of The Thirteenth Tale set in the town side of Cambridge.

Margaret Lea spends her days working in her father’s bookshop and writing occasional biography essays, when the famed author Vida Winter hires her to write her biography. Margaret’s initially a bit skeptical, since Vida loves telling wild stories to the press, but eventually she’s pulled into Vida’s life story. As a bookseller and general reader, Margaret’s interested in Vida’s most famous and most confusing work, a book promising thirteen tales that only includes 12 stories.

It’s easy to get sucked into Vida’s story of dark family secrets, creepy twins and a falling-down estate. I could see some of the twists coming but not nearly all of them, which is exactly how I like a story of suspense to go.  

In Once Upon A River, each character or family sees the mysterious child in a slightly different way, and there’s a similar theme here. as each character sees the twins of Angelfield through their own expectations. Vida remains a compelling character, even as I tried to figure out if she was lying and what information she might be leaving out.

Fans of the Cambridge setting might also like Limited Wish and The House At The End of Hope Street, for very different fiction set in the familiar streets. For the falling-down estate, I liked House of Trelawney, and of course Once Upon A River offers a similarly captivating mystery.