author: Diane Setterfield
name: Andrea
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2006/10/01
date added: 2009/10/10
shelves:
review:
This is a book that I end up re-reading in October, because it sets the stage for autumn. It’s dark, gloomy, foggy, British. It’s also a literary mystery in the truest sense: the protagonist, Margaret Lea, is a shy biographer who lives the in the apartment above her father’s antiquarian bookshop.

She receives a request from a popular author, Vida Winter (heavy-handed name, I know, but it’s the fictional author’s nom de plume, and it suits her type of work)to write her biography. Margaret doesn’t have much interest in the writer’s work until she picks up a copy of Winter’s Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, and realizes there are only twelve stories. What is the thirteen tale?

Just the character of Vida Winter, some kind of cross-pollination of Miss Havisham, Mommie Dearest, and Anne Rice, makes the book worth every minute.

This story is one of my favorites, but I will warn that it’s not perfect. Some of the more intimate storylines, particularly with Margaret, fail to really touch me, but the action, mystery, and setting bring me back to this book every time.