Twin powers

Highgate Cemetery, which opened in 1839, is perhaps the most famous of these parklands and a popular tourist attraction now. It is home to the remains of Karl Marx, Radclyffe Hall, Michael Faraday and the Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, among many other luminaries. It represents lives, secrets and stories jumbled together, the path through them determined by proximity and the tastes of the individual tour guide. In that way, it is like a novel.

Audrey Niffenegger makes the most of Highgate in a bewitching new novel, "Her Fearful Symmetry," which proves that death (as one currently popular saying goes) is only the beginning. That's true for Elspeth Noblin, who dies of cancer at age 44 after declaring: "A bad thing about dying is that I've started to feel as though I'm being erased. Another bad thing is that I won't get to find out what happens next."

A lot happens next, and a very unerased Elspeth participates in much of it, for there is a ghostly and passionate life after death: conflicts, like spirits, live on. Buried in Highgate, just over the fence from her former apartment, Elspeth's corporeal self has left behind an estranged twin sister, a younger lover whom she promises to haunt and a valuable estate that now belongs to her nieces, also twins, living in America. She stipulated that they can collect only if they move into her flat for a year and keep their parents out. Her reasons will be explained if Elspeth's lover, Robert - a neighbor and Ph.D. student writing an obsessive history of Highgate - can bear to read the diaries she's left him.