The Thirteenth Tale

Published for the first time in Russian, Diana Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" is a recognized masterpiece of modern English prose, a book that introduced the neo-Gothic genre to a wider audience and prompted Anglo-American critics to speak of a return to the golden age of the British novel, shrouded in the names of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Daphne du Maurier. This modest teacher's debut novel, the rights to which were purchased for an unprecedented sum for a novice author (800,000 pounds for the British edition, a million dollars for the American edition), outsold the bestsellers of recent years, was instantly translated into several dozen languages, and was honored by reviewers as "the new Jane Eyre." Margaret Lee works in her father's second-hand bookshop. She prefers Dickens and the Brontë sisters to modernity. Margaret is therefore surprised when she receives an offer from Vida Winter, the most famous writer of our time, to become her biographer. After all, Miss Winter is no less famous for her books than for the fact that she has never told a single interviewer a word of truth. And so, within the walls of a gloomy, haunted mansion, Margaret finds herself confronted with a literal Gothic story of twin sisters, strangely resonating with her own personal story and gradually leading to the solution to a mystery that has driven generations of readers mad—the mystery of "The Thirteenth Tale."