Skip to main content
Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel

Current price: $18.00
Publication Date: June 29th, 2010
Publisher:
Scribner
ISBN:
9781439169018
Pages:
416
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Her Fearful Symmetry is an enchanting, ghostly entertainment. Setting the novel in and around London's Highgate Cemetery, Niffenegger manipulates lives in time and space in a concoction of twins, sisters, and lost loves, along with some delightfully quirky neighbors, who provide another dimension to the meaning of love.

Marian Nielsen, Orinda Books, Orinda, CA
October 2009 Indie Next List

I'm still reeling from this incredible time-bending love story complete with ghosts. It involves two generations of twins and a London apartment building overlooking an historic cemetery. Julia and Valentina inherit their aunt's flat in London with many caveats, including not allowing their mother, the twin sister of said aunt, to visit. Everyone in the building needs or desires something or someone, and as the reader realizes that a ghost has come to stay, things turn both odd and beautiful. This is the next must read for book clubs!

Valerie Koehler, Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, TX
Winter 2011 Reading Group List

Description

From the author of the #1 bestselling The Time Traveler's Wife, a spectacularly compelling novel—set in and near Highgate Cemetery in London, about the love between twins, men and women, ghosts and the living.

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.

About the Author

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago and London. She has published two novels, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, and many illustrated books including The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. She is currently at work on The Other Husband, a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is now an HBO series.