In
Her Fearful Symmetry, Julia and Valentina Poole are 20-year-old twins with a seemingly unbreakable bond. When their Aunt Elspeth, their mother's twin sister, dies, they inherit her London apartment, but only if they live there for a year and that their parents never enter the apartment. Julia and Valentina move into the apartment and finds it is next to the famous Highgate Cemetery. They meet Martin, an obsessive compulsive whose wife has moved out, and Robert, who had been Elspeth's lover and is a scholar obsessed with the cemetery. Elspeth, however, has remained in the apartment as a ghost, and apparently, she's not alone. The twins and other residents of the building live isolated lives, but are drawn by attractions they can't always control. Audrey Niffenegger's novel has received mixed reviews with the New York Times saying, "Lovers of Niffenegger's past work should rejoice. This outing may not be as blindly romantic as
The Time Traveler's Wife, but it is mature, complex and convincing - a dreamy yet visceral tale of loves both familial and erotic, a search for Self in the midst of obsession with an Other.
Her Fearful Symmetry is as atmospheric and beguiling as a walk through Highgate itself."
