The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

This week marks the true end of the harvest season with Halloween, which I am celebrating broomstick and hat in tow in Burghley within the New Forest where legend has it, once lived a White Witch. I am not sure if most of the ghostly apparitions will be seen after a couple of glasses of mulled wine, but I am incredibly excited about seeing the last of the golden leaves in full glory. I have the added bonus that my god child is probably sat on her bed in full Witch gear already and I am currently furiously baking Halloween surprises to open with as Fairy Godmother. As I excitedly take the train on Friday (whilst trying to cram Pumpkin, Broomstick, Black Cat and baked goods into the overhead area) I will of course be opening up a novel to get me in the mood for All Hallows Eve…not to mention something to escape into when god child has eaten her sixth artificially coloured cupcake and is hanging from the ceiling like a bat at midnight!

This book’s cover with its set of eerie twins managed to scare Rohini back from the bookshelf so I suggest you buy it to ward off evil spirits if nothing else. Her Fearful Symmetry is set looking over Highgate Cemetery and begins with the death of glamorous and mysterious Elspeth Noblin who dies of cancer leaving her younger lover Robert, a PHD student, grief stricken.

Her resting place is of course Highgate Cemetery, where the author Audrey Niffenegger worked part time as a guide in her research, and the location is wonderfully depicted throughout the novel.

Elspeth herself was estranged from her identical twin Edie and leaves her fortune (which she amassed as a rare book dealer) and her gothic mansion flat to her twin American nieces she had never met, Julia and Valentina, on the condition they move to London and live in the flat a year before selling it. The twins are identical even down to their cells and are the mirror image of each other to the point where Valentina’s organs are reversed.

Niffenegger excels at looking at the relationships in the book. Julia and Valentina face the difficulty of being recognised in their own right, but this is not helped by their childish dependency on each other to the degree of dressing identically and sleeping in the same bed. The twins soon discover that Elspeth’s spirit has refused to die and is sulking around the flat in her old dresses, dabbling in Ouija boards and hiding in drawers. She is an amateur ghost in limbo trying to hone her skills for haunting.

Slowly the dark secret of Elspeth’s past and her future legacy reveals itself whilst Elspeth, who the book focuses around, painfully has to watch her lover Robert fall in love with Valentina who reminds him of a calmer and younger version of herself. The play out of the relationship links have the added aspect of Martin who also lives in the mansion block and who suffers from severe OCD so much so that his wife Marijke has left him. The books showdown comes when Valentina wants to break free from her dominant sister Julia.

You will no doubt have already heard of Niffenegger from her stunning debut novel The Time Traveller’s Wife, so expectations are high for this second long awaited book. However you may be disappointed that it doesn’t quite live up to the bone shaking story you hope it to be. There are many clichés and you get the feeling that Niffenegger has tried to distil together something of the Victorian scare masters Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and Wilkie Collins (The Women in White) but has ended up with something a little more vague and patched together.  Although she succeeds in describing Highgate Cemetery she falls down slightly on the rest of London. You get the impression this book could have started off with ‘There was once a dark great house at the end of long winding road on top of a hill’ and if you are expecting something new in the ghost story genre then this is not it. All aside, however, this is a great spooky read and Niffenegger is a talented author with some delightful characters being portrayed. Definitely worth the read on a train as you enter the darkest woodland depths with only your broomstick for company… – Lauren