I just finished a delightful novel, The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. It’s a first novel, which I often avoid, but I was grabbed from the first page.
As in the best of fiction, the experience of the characters rings true. One of the characters, Vida Winter, says this: “Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born….Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch on part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” Worth remembering as we make summer trips to visit family.