Summary: 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.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Niffenegger, a Chicago artist and writer with an elegantly romantic and otherworldly sensibility, earned international acclaim for The Time Traveler's Wife (2003). This season the film version of her best-selling debut will be quickly followed by this cunning and enrapturing ghost story. As evident in her exquisite, fairy tale–like illustrated novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters (2005) and The Adventuress (2006), Niffenegger has a discerning eye and a slyly gothic sensibility, elements that shape this tragicomic fantasy about two generations of twins. Valentina and Julia, inseparable, 20-year-old "mirror image" twins, are still living with their parents outside Chicago when they inherit a flat in London from Elspeth, their mother's long-estranged twin. Unaware of the painful secret that has kept Edwina and Elspeth apart, ethereal Julia and Valentina arrive in London to find they'll be living beside the historic Highgate Cemetery. The flat below theirs is occupied by Elspeth's broken-hearted, younger lover, Robert; the flat above is home to Martin, a crossword puzzle–maker plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it seems as though Elspeth is still in residence as a meddlesome ghost. With a sumptuously mournful mise-en-scene (Robert is a cemetery guide, as is the author), Niffenegger tells a gorgeously rendered, utterly bewitching, and profoundly unnerving tale of the mysteries of selfhood and death and the way love can be both a radiant and malevolent force. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.
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