Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (2009, Unabridged, Compact Disc)

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.

Key Details
Author:	Audrey Niffenegger
Language:	English
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Format:	Audio
ISBN-10:	0743599306
ISBN-13:	9780743599306

Additional Details
Narrated by:	Bianca Amato
Edition Description:	Unabridged

Size
Thickness:	1.5 in
Weight:	10.6 oz

Publisher's Note
After they inherit a London flat near Highgate Cemetery from their aunt Elspeth Noblin, two American twin teenagers move in, but they soon discover that much is still alive at Highgate, including, perhaps, their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old life behind.

Audrey Niffenegger's spectacularly compelling second novel opens with a letter that alters the fate of every character. Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American twenty-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never knew, has died of cancer, and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to this inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it; and that their parents may not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery. Julia and Valentina come to know the residents of their building. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt.

Author of one of the most beloved first novels in recent years, Niffenegger returns with an unnerving, unforgettable and enchanting ghost story, a novel about love and identity, secrets and sisterhood, and the tenacity of life -- even after death.

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.

Industry Reviews
"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...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)

"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)