I had four books going at once as I am wont to do, and this one floated to the top as the cream of the crop. A wonderful gothic ghost story with plenty of twists and turns to keep you thinking and just when you're sure you know whats really going on, Setterfield throws another wrench in the works.
One of the main characters in this novel is a writer, Vida Winter, and the other is a reader/writer/bookseller, Margaret Lea. I found both of these women's discussions of reading and stories and writing to be quite compelling. At one point Winter poses Lea a question, if all the books in the world were on a conveyer belt, moving toward a fire pit and controlled by one man, and you were alone with him in the room and had a gun, would you stop him? No one else need ever know. There goes all of Bronte, there goes all of Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare? Is one life worth all of the literature of the world? What is too precious to lose? What is the worth of story in our lives? To some people more, to some people less, but the question is an interesting one.
I was very taken with this book and I think it would make a great bookgroup selection. This one is worth moving to the top of the to be read pile.
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I'm glad to find someone else as entranced with this novel as I was. I was starting to worry : )
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