Galley Talk

Susan Taylor, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2006

I started reading The Thirteenth Taleby Diane Setterfield (Atria, Sept. 12), because it's a book about books and that appeals to the bookseller in me. It reminds me a bit of Jane Eyre, because it's an old-fashioned kind of book, and it has elements of living in a dank old mansion and being creeped out by that. The narrator is a bookseller who gets a letter from a famous writer who, after years of telling fanciful tales about her life, now wants to tell the bookseller the truth. From there, you're just drawn into the author's world, and you start to see why the books she writes are so fabulous. The bookseller also learns that life is more than just books—there has to be a human element in your life. It's definitely a reader's book, like The House of Paper, but more for women, because it's a female narrator and it's a woman's story.