The Thirteenth Tale (2006)

Setterfield writes as an affectionate inheritor of Victorian melodrama, staging her confession inside an austere Yorkshire estate choked with books and decaying rooms. The dying novelist Vida Winter summons an antiquarian biographer to hear the truth of her ruined ancestral home, Angelfield. What emerges is an intricate examination of feral twinhood, family madness and the lies we invent to live alongside trauma. The stakes feel intensely physical and earned.