The Thirteenth Tale

Margaret Lee works in her father’s secondhand bookstore. She prefers Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontë sisters to modern literature. So what was Margaret’s surprise when the suddenly appeared “most famous writer of our day,” the author of fifty-six novels whose multi-million print runs, it seems, have surpassed the combined circulation of the Sacred Scriptures, the mysterious recluse Vida Winter offered the girl to become her biographer?

After all, Miss Winter is famous not less for what she has not told a single journalist the truth about— in any questions from newspaper people or potential biographers, she saw nothing but an opportunity to once again dazzle them with her astonishing imagination and weave yet another captivating story.

And now, before Margaret—who finds herself within the walls of a gloomy mansion populated, quite literally, by ghosts of the past—a gothic story of twin sisters unfolds. In a strange way it echoes her own personal story and gradually leads to the solution of a mystery that drove many generations of readers crazy—the mystery of “the thirteenth tale”…