Vida’s story begins with siblings Charlie and Isabelle. Born into a strange, almost outcast family, Vida is raised in a large house called Angelfield on the English moors. Vida is the quintessential storyteller like Margaret, she lives and breathes stories.
Vida has led her followers astray for years, recounting any number of fanciful tales as the story of her life. When she is commissioned to write the biography of famous novelist Vida Winter, she wonders why. Margaret Lea is a bookseller and to her, reading is like breathing or eating it’s essential to sustain life. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.“There is something about words. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida’s storytelling but remains suspicious of the author’s sincerity. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.
Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter’s story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.Īs Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself - all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. All children mythologize their birth…So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter’s collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist.
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