The Thirteenth Tale (Competitive Non-Fiction)

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is a gem of a story. While it took me a little while to get into it, I found that by the end, I was completely pulled in.

Margaret Lea lives a rather small life. She spends most of her time working at her father’s antiquarian book shop where she arranges dusty books and deals with the occasional customer or helps a lost tourist. The vast majority of money for the family comes in through her father’s work as a facilitator of the sale of very rare and highly valuable books. This slow life revolving around books works for Margaret and has given her the time and space to develop a decent reputation as an amateur biographer, despite how little she has actually published. Unfortunately, living so close to her parents means that she must live near to her mother, who has never stopped mourning the loss of Margaret’s sister, and could never quite seem to connect with Margaret the way a daughter needs to connect with her mother. More