Suzi Feay

London Gothic

Her Fearful Symmetry

By

Jonathan Cape 390pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

I’m always vaguely suspicious of plots that require identical twins to function, especially in films; it seems such a cheap trick. Audrey Niffenegger’s follow-up to her bestseller The Time-Traveller’s Wife deploys not one but two sets of twins, one pair moreover being genetic ‘mirror images’, with matching but opposite facial moles and reversed internal organs. For fans of TTW, here’s another helping of kooky Gothic, this time with more horror than romance, set in and around Highgate cemetery in London. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us