The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This book is an example of such flagrantly bad writing that I could only struggle through 60 pages of it. Really, I should have stopped at this point; 'People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them.' Wow. Profound. The writing is roughly on the level of a promising 12-year-old. All of it is like that; stuffed to the bursting point with banalities and dull dull dull. Everything is so fucking predictable that the plot completely failed to capture my interest. Also, the sentence structure is unbearable; as in the quote I cited, the sentences diminish in length as paragraphs go on until they are reduced to 'impactful' two- or three-word phrases. I hated the main character too; a reclusive ex-conjoined twin lacking any identifiable personality trait, refusing to pick up anything written (it seems) later than 1900 and with a strange fondness for cocoa rather than normal food. Oh, also there is same-sex attraction and incest that is clearly intended to be *scandalous* but is actually just profoundly boring through trying too hard.