Synopsis
After delighting fans with her bestselling debut THE TIME-TRAVELER'S WIFE, Audrey Niffenegger waited six years to follow up with this sinister web of a book about a pair of twin sisters who inherit the London apartment of their deceased aunt, who was also the twin sister of their mother. The girls, Valentina and Julia, grew up in America and never met their Aunt Elspeth in life, but they soon become intimately acquainted with her ghost, as Elspeth is reluctant to leave the realm of the living. As Valentina and Julia interact with the unique inhabitants of the apartment building, their ethereal aunt becomes conflicted with feelings of nostalgia and jealousy, and begins to insinuate herself between the girls, weakening the fundamental bond between them and dangerously fraying the delicate ties between life, death, love and loss.
When Elspeth Noblin dies, she leaves everything to the 20-year-old American twin daughters of her own long-estranged twin, Edie. Valentina and Julia, as enmeshed as Elspeth and Edie once were, move into Elspeth's London flat and through a series of developing relationships a crisis develops that could pull the twins apart.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2009-09-29 |
| Size | | Length: | 406 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 24.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
After they inherit a London flat near Highgate Cemetery from their aunt Elspeth Noblin, two American twin teenagers, Julia and Valentina, move in and get to know their quirky neighbors, but they soon discover that much is still alive at Highgate, including, perhaps, their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment or life behind. By the best-selling author of The Time Traveler's Wife.
Industry Reviews
"Niffenegger tells a gorgeously rendered tale of the mysteries of selfhood and death and the way love can be both a radiant and malevolent force." (starred review)
(09/01/2009)
"Niffenegger...has a knack for taking the romantic into the realm of creepiness, and she constructs a taut mystery....It's no small achievement that the revelations are both organic and completely unexpected."
(09/21/2009)
"HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY buys into the literary and cinematic ghost story genre whole hog, embracing all of its best-known traditions....[but] the most powerful parts of [the book] deal not with paranormal events but with the ordinary pleasures and frustrations of life, which many of the novel's characters take for granted until those mundane things begin to slip out of reach..."
(09/21/2009)
"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...atmospheric and beguiling..."
(09/25/2009)
"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....[K]eep the children away and dust off the Ouija board; you're about to make contact with something deliciously creepy."
(09/30/2009)
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