Her Fearful Symmetry

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 09/29/2009
ISBN: 9781439165393
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.56lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.30w x 1.29d

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2009 pg. 59
Publishers Weekly 07/27/2009 pg. 46
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2009
Booklist 09/01/2009 pg. 6
Time 09/21/2009 pg. 85
New Yorker (The) 09/21/2009 pg. 95
Entertainment Weekly 10/02/2009 pg. 66
Time 10/05/2009 pg. 69
People Weekly 10/12/2009 pg. 54
Romantic Times 11/01/2009 pg. 58 - Excellent
Entertainment Weekly 10/30/2009 pg. 61
New Yorker (The) 12/14/2009 pg. 85
Booklist Ed Choice Adu Bk YA's 01/01/2010 pg. 10
Library Journal Annex 08/25/2009