Author: Audrey Niffenegger File Type: epub 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 Elspeths 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, Elspeths elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, includingperhapstheir aunt.Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best of the Month, September 2009 Following her breakout bestseller, The Time Travelers Wife, Audrey Niffenegger returns with Her Fearful Symmetry, a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry. The novel opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister back in Chicago. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julie and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience like one of their obsessively matched outfits. Historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeths home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors Elspeths former lover, Robert Martin, an agoraphobic crossword-puzzle creator and the ethereal Elspeth herself, struggling to adjust to the afterlife. Niffenegger brings these quirky, troubled characters to marvelous life, but readers may need their own supernatural suspension of disbelief as the story winds to its twisty conclusion. --Brad Thomas ParsonsFrom Publishers WeeklyNiffenegger follows up her spectacular The Time Travelers Wife with a beautifully written if incoherent ghost story. 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 Elspeths London flat bordering Highgate Cemetery in a building occupied by Elspeths lover, Robert, and the novels most interesting character, Martin, whose wife is long suffering due to his crushing and beautifully portrayed OCD. The girls are pallid and incurious they wander around London and spend time with Robert and Martin and Elspeths ghost. Valentinas developing relationship with Robert arouses mild jealousy, and when Valentina pursues her interest in fashion design, Julia disapproves, which leads Valentina and Elspeth to concoct an extreme plan to allow Valentina to lead her own life. The plan, unsurprisingly, goes awry, followed by weakly foreshadowed and confusing twists that take the plot from dull to silly. While Niffeneggers gifted prose and past success will garner readers, the story is a disappointment. Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Author: Jonas Staal File Type: pdf