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Tale spin | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books |
 | | In this highly readable specimen, mousey Margaret Lea turns up a rare copy of Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation by reclusive novelist Vida Winter, who has contacted Margaret out of the blue asking her to pen her biography. |
 | | This turns out to be a rich gothic stew (mad, wealthy family in a tumbledown mansion, rape, murder, a sinister pair of twins, mistaken identity and a touch of arson). |
 | | The title screams murder mystery, but the old religious who expires in this tragicomic tale of exotic 19th-century Damascus died of natural causes - though his society would call them unnatural, since he was in flagrante delicto with a youth, the novel's Jewish narrator, Aslan, at the time. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /reviews/roundupstory/0,,1884167,00.html (666 words) |
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