The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield, 2006
Mystery, thriller & crime Historical fictionContemporary fiction
A reclusive novelist hires a bookish young woman to write her life, and the truth arrives like a ghost.
Feels like serenity, wonder and melancholy. About identity, memory and morality.
A page from the book
Writers die; the voice in the book doesn't. Which is the real person?
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. Diane Setterfield.Diane Setterfield was a teacher of French literature; The Thirteenth Tale, her debut, became a bestseller by word of mouth.
Books that feel like this
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson, 2009
Also memory and morality.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Thirteenth Tale like?
- Feels like serenity, wonder and melancholy. About identity, memory and morality.
- What should I read after The Thirteenth Tale?
- If you liked The Thirteenth Tale, try The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafón), The Butterfly Garden (Dot Hutchison) and Daisy Darker (Alice Feeney).
A taste of the feed
The fairy tale that explains why some people keep striking matches.
And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t—could never be—hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.
The Butterfly Garden · Dot Hutchison
The difference between being remembered and being known.
Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue · V.E. Schwab
Death as sleep sounds restful until you try to think it through.
Imagine that, death was just like being asleep. Would he have time to think before it was all over? And would he have time to think that he had thought it? But wait, how much do you have to think before you have finished thinking?
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared · Jonas Jonasson
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