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.