Staff Pick
After six long years, Audrey Niffenegger gives us a gem of a ghost story. Based around two sets of twins, Highgate Cemetery in London, a haunted flat, and long-buried secrets, this story proves even better than The Time Traveler's Wife. With a shocking and seemingly impossible twist, this fabulous novel is worth the very long wait. I loved it! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Six years after the phenomenal success of
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers — with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.
The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including — perhaps — their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.
Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life — even after death.
Review
"[M]esmerizing....[A] deeply moving story filled with unforgettable characters....[A] beautiful testament to Niffenegger's fertile imagination and love of storytelling." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"With a sumptuously mournful mise-en-scene (Robert is a cemetery guide, as is the author), Niffenegger tells a gorgeously rendered, utterly bewitching, and profoundly unnerving tale of the mysteries of selfhood and death and the way love can be both a radiant and malevolent force." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Niffenegger creates such marvelous scenes of muted sadness and smothered affection that you don't entirely mind that the parts are better than the whole....[D]eliciously creepy." Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"Her Fearful Symmetry's characters feel too spectral, and their insane solutions to relatively simple problems make them hard to care about. (Grade: C+)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Her Fearful Symmetry glows all over with an addictive, crowd-pleasing charm....In breezy, capable prose, she builds terrific tension toward a series of last-minute turns...that finally do, in a puzzling and strange way, satisfy." San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
The author of the phenomenally successful novel The Time Traveler's Wife returns with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second book set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
Synopsis
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.
An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.
Synopsis
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers—with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another. They are twenty. .
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building’s other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt, who can’t seem to leave her old apartment and life behind..
Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life—even after death..
Synopsis
A
New York Times Bestseller.
"An enchanting novel, beautifully crafted and as dazzlingly imaginative as it is dizzyingly romantic."—Scott Turow
Video
About the Author
Audrey Niffenegger is a writer, professor and visual artist. Her first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, was an international bestseller that received praise from USA Today, The Washington Post, People Magazine, and The Denver Post, among numerous publications. Niffenegger has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation and the Corporation of Yaddo, and has also received a Fellowship in Prose from the Illinois Arts Council. She received her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University. Her writing has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Zoetrope, and The London Guardian. Her art is in the collections of the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Temple University, among others. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches writing in the Interdisciplinary Books Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.