Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

 Setterfield's lovely, melancholy novel opens on the Winter Solstice, 1887. Locals have gathered at the Swan Inn for their usual storytelling, when a severely injured man carrying a dead girl enters and collapses. Hours later, the dead girl miraculously comes to life, and the villagers are left with the story of a lifetime. But who is she? The girl herself won't speak, so everyone is left to speculate; is she the child of a wealthy family kidnapped two years ago, the granddaughter of a local farmer whose son can't stay out of trouble, a sister gone missing decades ago, a gypsy girl left behind by accident?

At its heart, Once Upon a River is about the stories we tell -- to entertain, to remind us of what happened, to convince others, to hide from ourselves, to heal. The novel spans a year, during which we get to know a large number of locals, all of them movingly characterized. Setterfield is a gentle writer who is able to find the humanity in everyone. Life on the Thames in 1887 could be brutal and cruel, but also kind and forgiving. And if you get a good story out of it, so much the better.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This creepy, compelling gothic novel was the perfect read for October nights.  Margaret Lea, a bibliophile and sometime biographer, is summoned to the home of a reclusive writer who is finally ready to reveal the truth about her background -- incest, insanity, and murder set in a decaying ancestral home (the plot owes much to Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, and even The Fall of the House of Usher).

Margaret's narration is at first overwritten and mannered, something I find in gothic novels no matter when they are written; I think in most cases a baroque plot is better served with plainer language. As the book progresses, however, and Margaret gets caught up in Vida Winter's story, her style settles down.  Vida's sections, on the other hand, are a treat. There is a real satisfaction in seeing this character who has written so many stories and told so many lies struggle to finally tell the truth, and to do it coherently.  In particular, the way she shifts from third person to first person plural to first person singular is crucial to understanding who she truly is (literally and metaphorically).

The novel is stripped of any extraneous material; there are no references to friends or outsiders, the world at large is barely mentioned, and descriptions of surroundings are kept to a minimum.  This not only emphasizes the claustrophobia of the stories themselves -- Margaret's and Vida's -- it adds a sense of eerie timelessness to the narrative.  Read this with a mug of cocoa and a blanket wrapped around yourself.