Biographer Margaret Lea returns one night to her apartment above her father's antiquarian bookshop. On her steps she finds a letter. It is a hand-written request from one of Britain's most prolific and well-loved novelists. Vida Winter, gravely ill, wants to recount her life story before it is too late, and she wants Margaret to be the one to capture her history. The request takes Margaret by surprise-she doesn't know the author, nor has she read any of Miss Winter's dozens of novels.
Late one night while pondering whether to accept the task of recording Miss Winter's personal story, Margaret begins to read her father's rare copy of Miss Winter's Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation. She is spellbound by the stories and confused when she realizes the book only contains twelve stories. Where is the thirteenth tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet Miss Winter and act as her biographer.
As Vida Winter unfolds her story, she shares with Margaret the dark family secrets that she has long kept hidden as she remembers her days at Angelfield, the now burnt-out estate that was her childhood home. Margaret carefully records Miss Winter's account and finds herself more and more deeply immersed in the strange and troubling story. In the end, both women have to confront their pasts and the weight of family secrets. As well as the ghosts that haunt them still.
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[It was November]***
(Audible Studios, 11 July 2007, 14 hours 12 minutes, audiobook, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2020, a book that passes the bechdel test, bought from @audibleuk, narrated by Jenny Agutter)
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I saw the movie last year and thought it was amazing. I discovered a few months ago I'd bought the audiobook long before this and had forgotten all about it. So of course I had to listen to it. So of course I had high expectations. I needn't have worried. I absolutely loved this. I loved the quality of the audiobook, the narration was amazing. I loved the story as well. I enjoy a good gothic mystery, the darker and more unsettling the better. The Thirteenth Tale takes dark and unsettling to a whole new level. The story moves back and forth between the present with Margaret gathering information and attempting to write Vida's biography and the past of both women, revealing dark secrets from Vida's disturbing childhood living in Angelfield, a massive house, burned in a fire and long forgotten. Vida's darkest secrets are not revealed until almost the end of the book and made my flesh crawl.