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Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
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Booklists and Suggested Reading
If You Like . . . The Thirteenth Tale Booklist
Page Modified: April 5, 2008
Literary Gothics . . . secrets & dark mysteries abound
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
Link: The Literary Gothic site
Additional Booklists: Ghosts | Authors
- The Thirteenth Tale
Author: Setterfield, Diane
Publisher: Atria $ 26 ISBN: 0743298020 Date: 2006
Kirkus
Amateur biographer Margaret Lea receives a letter from reclusive author Vida Winter, summoning her to write Vida's life story. As Margaret pieces together Vida's story on her own, what she discovers is a chilling and transforming experience.
The Thirteenth Tale website
Updated 7.11.06 - Jamaica Inn
Author: Du Maurier, Daphne
Date: 1936
The coachman tried to warn her away from the ruined, forbidding place on the rainswept Cornish coast. But young Mary Yellan chose instead to honor her mother's dying request that she join her frightened Aunt Patience and huge, hulking Uncle Joss Merlyn at Jamaica Inn. From her first glimpse on that raw November eve, she could sense the inn's dark power. But never did Mary dream that she would become hopelessly ensnared in the vile, villainous schemes being hatched within its crumbling walls -- or that a handsome, mysterious stranger would so incite her passions ... tempting her to love a man whom she dares not trust.
Updated 9.13.06 - Rebecca
Author: Du Maurier, Rebecca
Publisher: Avon Date: 1938
Rebecca has been dead for several months, but her sinister influence is still very much alive at Manderley, as Maxim de Winter's second wife soon comes to realize.
Updated 9.13.06
Properties
of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics - Clara Reeve
Author: Hargrave, Leonie (aka Thomas Disch)
Date: 1975
Orphaned Clara inherits the fortune of her unpleasant great-uncle and marries into a strange family with dark secrets. Her marriage to Niles is never consummated and she has to contend with his wicked mother Zaide and her coarse manservant.
"Disch, a poet and much acclaimed writer of speculative fiction under his own name, romps through the conventions while maintaining a scholar's eye on his detail . . . a tour de force . . . meticulouly recreated affectionate homage." - Michele Slung, The Gothic Mystery
Updated 9.13.06 - Ghost Writer
Author: Harwood, John
Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151010749 Date: 2004Kirkus
Harwood's tantalizing tale of suspense and family secrets weaves Victorian ghost stories into the present where they start to come true. This astonishing, assured debut shows just how dangerous family skeletons--and stories--can be.
Updated 9.13.06 - The Probable Future
Author: Hoffman, Alice
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385507607 Date: 2003PW
By turns chilling and enchanting The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows' legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Culminating in an exquisite ending, this story showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Hoffman one of America's most treasured writers.
Updated 5.6.03 - Ex-Libris
Author: King, Ross
Publisher: Walker $ 26 ISBN:0802733573 Date: 2001BooklistKirkus
A cryptic summons to a remote country house launches a London bookseller on an odyssey through 17th-century Europe. Given the task of restoring a magnificent library that has been pillaged during the English Civil War, Isaac Inchbold finds himself slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies, smugglers, ciphers, and forgeries.
Updated 9.18.06 - Bellefleur
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Date: 1980
Joyce Carol Oates's Bellefleur was hailed by critics as "a masterpiece" and "a gothic of major proportions."
Also of interest: A Bloodsmoor Romance, 1982 and Mysteries of Winterthurn, 1984
Updated 9.13.06 - The Quincunx
Author: Palliser, Charles
Publisher: Ballantine $ 25 ISBN: 0345364635 Date: 1990
An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary--a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century -- London itself.
Updated 9.18.06 - The Unburied
Author: Palliser, Charles
Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374280355 Date: 1999LJPW
Three separate tales are interwoven in this novel about Dr. Courtine, an unworldly academic, who is invited to spend the days before Christmas with an old friend. Doubly distracted, he becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the sequence of terrible events that follows his arrival.
Updated 9.18.06 - The Manikin
Author: Scott, Joanna
Publisher: Back Bay $ 22.50 ISBN: 0805039740 Date:1996KirkusBooklist
The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world--filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles--wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.
Updated 9.13.06 - The Vanished Child
Author: Smith, Sarah
Publisher: Ballantine $ 20 ISBN: 0345373502 Date: 1992
New England, 1887. The millionaire William Knight is brutally murdered and the only witness is his grandchild, Richard, who himself disappears, and is presumed dead. Eighteen years later, Richard is "recognized" in Switzerland in the person of Alexander von Reisden, and William Knight's only son, Gilbert, is convinced that this man is the long lost child. Reisden, himself, has no memory of any childhood, and his own growing obsession with finding the real Richard is leading him closer to a shattering thruth. And to a killer, still at large....
Updated 9.13.06 - Shadow of the Wind
Author: Zafon, Carlos Ruiz
Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200106 Date: 2004Kirkus
The international literary sensation--a runaway bestseller in Spain--is about a boy's quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proved as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 1.29.05 - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins
- Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Udulfo and The Italian by Mrs Radcliffe
- The Castle of Otranto by Horace and Hugh Walpow
- Ghost Walk
Author: Macdonald, Marianne
Publisher: St Martins $ 21.95 ISBN: 031219417X Date: 1998Kirkus
Already far too busy with running her antiquarian bookshop, caring for a new baby, and worrying about her eccentric father, Dido nevertheless feels a compulsion to help solve the mystery when a crazy old customer is found murdered.
Updated 9.13.06 - Death's Autograph, 1997
- Smoke Screen, 1999
- Road Kill, 2000
- Die Once, 2003
- 3 Monkeys, 2005
- Faking It (2006)
- Joan Aiken
- Evelyn Berckman
- Madeline Brent
- Dorothy Eden
- Barbara Erskine
- Isabelle Holland
- Victoria Holt
- Susan Howatch
- Barbara Michales
- Anya Seton
- Mary Stewart
- Phyllis A. Whitney
Author: Goldstein, Rebecca
Publisher: Houghton $ 23 ISBN: 0395986591 Date: 2000
LJThis grand Gothic novel is about the outer reaches of passion--of the body and of the mind--and about the betrayals that so often breed in that perilous place. Properties of Light carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light.
Updated 7/20/00
Books that might be on Margaret's bookshelf:
Margaret might hang out with Marianne Macdonald's Dido Hoare:
Other titles in the series include:
Key Authors:
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