Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers – normal, at least, for identical ‘mirror’ twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London.

They feel that at last their own lives can begin …but have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins’ mother – and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat…

With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, “Her Fearful Symmetry” is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger’s familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

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But 8-year-old Lucy can’t bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods – so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens – an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come.

Trevor’s new novel beautifully evokes rural Ireland and the tensions existing there, but also is Hardy-like in its portrayal of the impact of mere chance on a life.

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Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape that his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain. As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that Orren has become more remote than she could ever have imagined, and that silence has taken hold of their relationship.

When she begins to play the piano for the local church, she meets the local preacher, and feels a dangerous attraction for him. As events unfold over this single summer, C.E. Morgan takes us on a journey which describes the journey of our own lives.

This novel is about every single relationship between a man and a woman — past, present and future — and about the distance between the lives we lead and the lives we imagine for ourselves.

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