Product Description

At last - another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of "The Time Traveler's Wife".

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers - normal, at least, for identical 'mirror' twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn't know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin ...but have no idea that they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt's mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins' mother - and who can't even seem to quite leave her flat. With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, "Her Fearful Symmetry" is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger's familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Review
`A hot contender for the book of the year' --Red

`...(Niffenegger) constructs a taut mystery ...It's no small achievement that the revelations are both organic and completely unexpected'
--The New Yorker

"Delicious and deadly" --Yorkshire Evening Post

`a powerful and beautiful exploration of the relationships between the living and dead...Niffenegger's writing has lost none of its emotional power'
--Psychologies

"Chillingly good" --Marie Claire

"There's no mistaking Niffenegger's originality...She's a real rarity: at once a good writer and a genuine obsessive" --Evening Standard

"Stylish, easy to read... with a dark, delicious plot which has several neat twists" --Scotsman

"A multi-layered, absorbingly nuanced love story...Beautifully constructed and unfurling with exquisite tragedy..." --Easy Living

"Delicious prose...She lays out her story in delectable, textual pictures...a powerful, beautifully written ghost story"
--Mslexia

`A ghostly love story and a lovely ghost story.' --Tatler

"This is a rich, involving novel..." -- The Times

"Niffenegger's books are fabulously left field, striking an unlikely balance between romance and fantasy. A brilliantly beautiful book."
-- Glamour magazine

"...Niffenegger rarely reverts to stereotypes when creating her characters...they are always interesting..."
"...an emotional depth rarely found in ghost stories." --Sunday Herald

"Niffenegger's story is written with a lightness of touch and with a great eye for the oddities of human behaviour". --Daily Telegraph

"a nicely atmospheric book".
--Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
Audrey Niffenegger is an exceptionally creative writer and visual artist who has achieved enormous success in both worlds. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, has sold nearly five million copies worldwide and has been translated into thirty-three languages to date. A Richard & Judy book club choice in the UK, it has been a huge bestseller all round the world. In the Daily Telegraph's readers' poll of the 'Top 50 Books of All Time' it appeared at no. 11. Niffenegger is also the author of two 'novels-in-pictures', The Three Incestuous Sisters(2005) and The Adventuress (2006), both published by Cape. Her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile was recently serialized in the Guardian and will be published soon on the Cape Graphic list. A Chicago native, Niffenegger received her MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Northwestern University. Her art has been widely exhibited in the United States and is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress and Harvard University's Houghton Library.

Customer Reviews

A deliciously dark and twisted ghostly tale.
When your first book is the critical and popular success that 'The Time Traveler's Wife' has been, how can your second full length novel hope to live up to that promise? Well, by and large, this book does just that.

Her Fearful Symmetry is a bittersweet twenty-first-century ghost story about love, loss and identity. When Elspeth dies of Leukemia, she leaves behind a strange bequest that will have dramatic and tragic consequences. She leaves her London flat and all the trappings of her life to the `mirror' twins of her own twin sister who live outside Chicago. The only condition is that the twins, Julia and Valentina, (who have no idea that they even had an aunt) have to live in the flat, adjacent to Highgate Cemetery, for a year before they can sell it.

Niffenegger again covers themes such as loss and identity together with love that in her world always seems to have a dark twist. But it is her lucid imagery that again makes the exceptional (in this case, ghosts) seem wholly acceptable and normal. The twins have a level of mutual dependency, but are very different characters and much of the story revolves around their fight to establish their own independent identities.

Downstairs is Robert, Elspeth's former lover, who works as a guide in neighbouring Highgate Cemetery while trying to write his seemingly never-ending thesis on the history of the graveyard. He, like Valentina, is shy and the two are drawn to each other.

Upstairs is the OCD-suffering Martin, a crossword compiler whose Dutch wife has left him and whose mental illness has got so bad that he cannot leave his own flat in order to chase after her. There is a stunningly beautiful moment when he arranges with his estranged wife a birthday meal, involving her going to a restaurant with her mobile phone so that they can `eat together'. The ever-curious Julia is drawn to him.

But it is in the twins' flat that things get really mysterious. The first intruder they are aware of is the wonderfully named Little Kitten of Death, but there is also a strange presence in the form of Elspeth herself. But can Elspeth work out how to communicate with the twins? And what will she have to say about Valentina's friendship with her former lover, Robert? And all the time there is the fascinating location of Highgate Cemetery itself.

Like 'The Time Traveler's Wife', 'Her Fearful Symmetry' is a thought-provoking and bittersweet novel that will keep you enthralled from the first page to the last. It draws you in and tugs at your emotions. The ending seems slightly rushed though and is quite sudden, but it continues to twist and turn right up to the final chapter.

A Sensational Gothic Gem
Her Fearful Symmetry is primarily a tale of twins. We have Edie and Elspeth and we have Julia and Valentina who are Edie's daughters. From the opening of the book we witness the last days of Elspeth's life as she succumbs to her terminal illness. Meanwhile across the pond in America the sister she has not spoke to for many years knows nothing of her death until her daughters receive a letter in which the aunt that they have never met leaves them all her money and a flat in Highgate. There is one condition, the girls must live there for a year under the promise that Edie and her husband Jack are never to enter the flat.

Despite their mothers reservations the promise of intrigue (and freedom) draws the girls straight over the day after their twenty first birthday. Once arriving in a foreign country and the foreign place that is Highgate they fall into the lives of Robert the aunts ex-toy boy lover and Martin, possibly my favourite human character, a recluse who cannot leave the house for fear of germs yet whose wife has just left him, The Little Kitten of Death and the biggest character of all Highgate Cemetery which is just over the wall in the back garden. Oh and did I mention that Elspeth may be dead but she definitely hasn't left her flat but why? With the mystery as to why Elspeth and Edie never saw each other for years and just what she didn't want the twins to find out slowly uncurling with Highgate Cemetery in the back ground this becomes a supernatural tale with more than one twist and an ending that I never saw coming and couldn't have predicted.

I really enjoyed it the book, as well as being dark and gothic it looks at humans and how we react to growing up, loss, death and control. The girls becoming independent creates quite a rift between the two of them that wasn't there before. Robert has to deal with the loss of his lover while he finds a new one and becomes ever so slightly addicted to the cemetery and late night wanderings. Martin has to work out if he loves the wife who has abandoned him enough to let go of his phobias and control issues and actually leave the house. It's all here along with a ghost story, that in part three was just so gloriously sensationalist and creepy and very twisty (am I making sense still?) that I couldn't put it down.

If I had any slight reservations, and they would be tiny, some of it was a little contrived such as the girls finding out they had inherited money just before their 21st and leaving the moment they literally turned 21. But then who am I to comment isn't that the basis of all the great sensation novels and I love those! I also found the last 100 pages were a sudden rush of secrets revealed a few complex twists and suddenly it was over, I could have happily read that in another 50 pages more with great pleasure. All in all a wonderful romp that is so far away from its predecessor you couldn't compare the two at all apart from the fact they are both brilliant.

Wooden until the final section
I'm still dithering about whether this was a 2 or 3 star read. It's hard not to make comparisons with The Time Traveler's Wife, which I thought was a wonderful story, beautifully written. Towards the end, Her Fearful Symmetry felt just as compelling, but at others it was dull to the point of being tedious. And then the tenor of the novel suddenly changed, becoming dark, macabre even. Prepare at this stage to be shocked and repelled, but read on, because the story metamorphoses into a gripping, if unlikely, exposé of trying to interfere with nature.

As other reviewers have said, it's a story of twin sisters from Chicago who inherit the flat of an aunt they have never met, overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. Julia is the dominant personality, while Valentina, whom she affectionately refers to as Mouse, is less certain of herself and, being a mirror image of her sister (even her heart is on the right), is more delicate. In particular, she is asthmatic. Inevitably, Valentina reaches a point where she wants to escape the claustrophobic relationship but can't see any way of doing so. Until...

From the start, there is an air of mystery. The aunt's will stipulates that the twins must live in the flat for a year before they can sell it but that their parents must never set foot in it. The aunt (Elspeth) and the twins' mother (Edie) were also twins and had once been as close as Julia and Valentina. So what had caused such a rift?

From a novelist who made involuntary time travel sound as if it were a known, albeit rare, condition, it came as no surprise that parts of this story are told from the viewpoint of a ghost. But this is where Her Fearful Symmetry seemed to me the weaker novel. The quality of The Time Traveler's Wife was such that time travel seemed a perfectly plausible phenomenon. Her Fearful Symmetry, on the other hand, read as if it were fantasy in the author's mind rather than anything that might be truly possible.

For this reason, small annoyances niggled. The characters' thoughts, spelled out in italics throughout the story, became irritating and did not contribute any feeling of the characters as real people. They seemed rather two-dimensional to me, except perhaps for Martin who suffered a compulsive cleaning disorder and lived in the flat upstairs. Mention of a racoon (in London!) really grated. Deciding that such a talented author would surely not make such a mistake, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she was relating the twins' ignorance rather than her own. Even so, some touches appealed - I loved the idea of a ghost feeling so insubstantial that it daren't go outside in case a breeze dispersed it, or that collapsed in an amorphous puddle on the floor when it tried to pass through a ceiling.

Although I reached a point where I wished I hadn't bothered with this book, the last section, unreal though it was, left such an impression that I haven't stopped thinking about it. For this reason I would recommend anyone to try it and see what you think!