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.

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406 pages

Average rating: 6.9

29 RATINGS

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5 REVIEWS

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Community Reviews

Anonymous
Feb 25, 2024
6/10 stars
Weird and troubling plot, not nearly as good as the TimeTraveler's Wife. I had a strong dislike for all of the pathetic characters, and they were all quite boring.
aj drew
Feb 02, 2024
9/10 stars
Interesting twist at the end. Pretty good if you like the ghost aspect.
margardenlady
Dec 27, 2023
10/10 stars
Good view on twinness and somewhat startling paranormal behavior. A tale well told, with many happy endings and a few surprising ones.
witch.riot
Jun 15, 2023
6/10 stars
This really does pale in comparison to her first novel. There are similar elements, and the story is well-told to a certain extent. It just felt so rushed near the end. I'm starting to wonder if this is a theme in modern books, because all the new novels I've read recently were unnecessarily long and yet incredibly rushed and lazy near the end. Overall it's really quite enjoyable, but it definitely could have used a couple more edits. I suggest this if you like love stories with tinges of gothic era themes.
KikiStoneCreek
Jun 03, 2023
6/10 stars
I didn't like this book as much as I did "The Time Traveler's Wife." It had a lot of potential but then it went down a dark path.

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