Finished The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Excellent Gothic with its roots in Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw. Vida Winter is billed as the 20th century Dickens and now, aged and ill, has decided to finally tell the truth about her life. Since her illness makes it difficult to write, she hires Margaret Lea to tell her story. Like Winter, Lea has secrets of her own, secrets that resonate with Winter's story, and so this turns into two life stories by way of family stories and merged to a degree with a detective story, where Lea has to research to be sure Winter is telling her the truth. Oh, and there may be a haunting as well.
If you're susceptible to 19th century fiction, even though the bulk of this story takes place sometime after automobiles and billboards become common but well before cell phones and the Internet, and if you enjoy stories of women struggling against obstacles, a story by turns sad and dire with something like redemption possible, and all in excellent, evocative prose, you would find this novel hard to put aside.
