The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel - Brady Udall

A family drama with stinging turns of dark comedy, the latest from Udall (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) is a superb performance and as comic as it is sublimely catastrophic. Golden Richards is a polygamist Mormon with four wives, 28 children, a struggling construction business, and a few secrets. He tells his wives that the brothel he's building in Nevada is actually a senior center, and, more importantly, keeps hidden his burning infatuation with a woman he sees near the job site. Golden, perpetually on edge, has become increasingly isolated from his massive family—given the size of his brood, his solitude is heartbreaking—since the death of one of his children. Meanwhile, his newest and youngest wife, Trish, is wondering if there is more to life than the polygamist lifestyle, and one of his sons, Rusty, after getting the shaft on his birthday, hatches a revenge plot that will have dire consequences. With their world falling apart, will the family find a way to stay together? Udall's polished storytelling and sterling cast of perfectly realized and flawed characters make this a serious contender for Great American Novel status.

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer

The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton (nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff) writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories. The occasionally contrived letters jump from incident to incident—including the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society while Guernsey was under German occupation—and person to person in a manner that feels disjointed. But Juliet's quips are so clever, the Guernsey inhabitants so enchanting and the small acts of heroism so vivid and moving that one forgives the authors (Shaffer died earlier this year) for not being able to settle on a single person or plot. Juliet finds in the letters not just inspiration for her next work, but also for her life—as will readers.

Between Here and April - Deborah Copaken Kogan

Starred Review. How could a mother kill her children? This breathtaking first novel from photojournalist Kogan (Shutterbabe) attempts a heart-wrenching answer. Elizabeth Lizzie Burns Steiger, a 41-year-old TV producer/journalist, has a hallucination while watching a performance of Medea at a Manhattan theater; she sees her best friend in first grade, April Cassidy, who was killed by April's depressed mother, Adele, in 1972 in Potomac, Md., along with April's sister. In addition to exploring her memories in therapy, Lizzie interviews the Cassidys' former neighbor and others who knew the family for a proposed cable network documentary, but a priceless Pandora's box—tapes of Adele with her psychiatrist—provides the most startling revelations. Kogan skillfully interweaves Lizzie's struggles with her troubled marriage, parenting and a personal trauma shared in the Balkans with a former lover in this unflinching portrait of filicide, which still manages to find light in the darkness of a very disturbing subject. (Sept.)

The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage - Clara Kelly

As a small child, Kelly spent nearly four years in a brutal Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia during WWII. She survived because of her mother, who cared for her three children (including a newborn baby), found them food and shelter, nurtured them with unwavering love under appalling conditions, and insisted on honesty, decency, even good manners, as they coped with filth, hunger, and disease. The child's-eye view of her brave parent makes this memoir a moving, immediate account of a relatively unknown wartime drama. From a pampered Dutch colonial life on the "exotic" island of Java, complete with a household of sweet, faithful, "native" servants, the young mother suddenly found herself assigned the job of cleaning out the camp sewers as well as keeping her children safe. The portrait is idealized, but the facts of family survival are undeniable. The most unforgettable moment frames the story: at the end of the war, as they stagger off the crowded boat in Holland, sick and starving, Kelly's grandmother demands of them, "Why didn't you escape?" Hazel Rochman

A Reliable Wife - Robert Goolrick

Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Don't be fooled by the prissy cover or that ironic title. Robert Goolrick's first novel, "A Reliable Wife," isn't just hot, it's in heat: a gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower. This is a bodice ripper of a hundred thousand pearly buttons, ripped off one at a time with agonizing restraint. It works only because Goolrick never cracks a smile, never lets on that he thinks all this overwrought sexual frustration is anything but the most serious incantation of longing and despair ever uttered in the dead of night. The curtain rises in 1907 during a Wisconsin winter "cold enough to sear the skin from your bones." Ralph Truitt, the wealthiest man in town, stands frozen in place on a train platform, but inside he's burning with the unsated desire of 20 solitary years. Ralph is waiting for his mail-order bride, a woman he requisitioned through a classified ad: "Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical not romantic reasons. . . . Discreet." That may sound as horny as Sunday school, but Ralph isn't entirely what he seems, standing there on the platform with "his eyes turned downward, engraved with a permanent air of condescension and grief." Inside, the 58-year-old widower is startled by the intensity of his desires, consumed with thoughts of sex and murder and madness in homes all around town. "Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin," Goolrick writes. "He had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning." This first chapter, in which everything appears stock still, is told in a husky whisper of something lurid and painful, "the terrible whip of tragedy." Again and again, we hear this refrain, like a judgment and a curse: "These things happened." Keep this in mind as you're scanning the personal ads in the City Paper. When Catherine Land finally arrives, looking prim and dour, she isn't what she appears to be, either. She threw her extravagant party dresses out the train window a few miles from town, and she has hidden jewels in the hem of her black wool dress. She's not even the woman in the photo she sent Ralph during their summer of tentative correspondence. And she's carrying a bottle of arsenic and "a long and complicated scheme." Poor Ralph has some awfully bad luck with women: the matrimonial equivalent of sailing to Europe on the Titanic and flying home on the Hindenburg. "This begins in a lie," he tells Catherine sternly as he picks up her bags. "I want you to know that I know that. . . . Whatever else, you're a liar." All Ralph wants -- or pretends he wants -- is "a simple, honest woman. A quiet life. A life in which everything could be saved and nobody went insane." That's so hard to attain when your new bride hopes to poison you straightaway. But damned if he doesn't almost die in a spectacular riding accident while bringing her home from the station. Poor Catherine finds she's got to nurse Ralph back to health before she can start killing him. Don't worry: I'm not giving anything away. Neither of these two steely people is playing straight with the other, and Goolrick isn't playing straight with us, either. The floor collapses in almost every chapter, and we suddenly crash through assumptions we'd thought were solid. Goolrick keeps probing at the way people force themselves not to know something -- not to believe the truth -- in order to fulfill their deepest longings. The novel is deliciously wicked and tense, presented as a series of sepia tableaux, interrupted by flashes of bright red violence. The whole thing takes place in a fever pitch of exquisite sensations and boundless grief in a place where "the winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air." The word "alone" spreads through these pages like mold in the cellar, until it's everywhere. The stillness and whiteness of the Wisconsin setting eventually give way to the lush depravity of St. Louis, lined with music halls and opium dens. Much of this section takes place in "a tented, brocaded bedroom, like a palace abandoned before a revolution." I'm reluctant to quote much more for fear of making the book sound silly -- "Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart" -- but once you've fallen into the miasma of "A Reliable Wife," it's intoxicating. (Columbia Pictures has already grabbed the rights for what could be an inflammable movie.) I'm reminded of Edgar Allan Poe's stories with their claustrophobic atmosphere, hyper-maudlin tone and the extravagant suffering that borders on garishness. (Yes, Goolrick includes a forlorn castle, too.) These are all qualities the author displayed in his equally gothic memoir, "The End of the World as We Know It" (2007). But his inspiration for "A Reliable Wife" reportedly came from "Wisconsin Death Trip," a grim collection of antique photographs published in 1973. The editor of that book, Michael Lesy, reproduced pictures of children laid to rest and parents in shock, along with newspaper anecdotes about murder, illness, assault and insanity -- the same kinds of ghastly tales that obsess Goolrick's overheating characters. Ultimately, this bizarre story is one of forgiveness. But the path to that salutary conclusion lies through a spectacularly orchestrated crescendo of violation and violence, a chapter you finish feeling surprised that everyone around you hasn't heard the screams, too.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel - Jeannette Walls

For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marie Arana It's a rare family memoir that packs all the power of a Charles Dickens novel. The adults must be as cruel as they are foolish, the children as resourceful as they are wise. Yet the characters in Jeannette Walls's best-selling 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," possessed all those Dickensian qualities. Walls's father, Rex, was a con man and an alcoholic; her mother, Rose Mary, unhinged and immature; together they made for disastrous parents, and the misery they inflicted was dire. So it's no surprise that the story of this coal-town family, in all its glorious dysfunction, sold 2.5 million copies. Overseas, it was read in 25 languages. The readers who got to know Rex and Rose Mary were legion, and they closed "The Glass Castle" wanting to know more. But the sequel that Walls now offers is not a memoir at all. Written from the point of view of her gritty West Texan grandmother, "Half Broke Horses" is described as a "True-Life Novel," and the story it tells takes place not within the author's lifetime, but half a century before she was born. The heroine and narrator is Lily Casey Smith, the spunky daughter of an ex-convict and a pious, God-fearing mother. Born in 1901 in a dugout, "more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank," Lily grows up with a floor that runs to mud during the rainy season and a ceiling that drops the occasional snake or scorpion. Her father believes in a Theory of Purpose; her mother believes in the power of prayer. In truth, they agree on very little, aside from the principle that bathrooms inside houses are downright disgusting. By 5, Lily is learning to train her father's horses. At 6, she's in charge of breaking them in. A veteran of ill winds and droughts, she learns to love that hard, yellow land, even though the land doesn't appear to love her much in return. When a tornado smashes a windmill into the family abode, her father wails, "If I owned hell and west Texas, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell." But Lily is an indomitable young woman. By 12, she is running the ranch, mucking out the barns, helping to geld the horses, giving the ranch hands all the orders. At 15, she proves so headstrong that she heads out on horseback to make a new life as an itinerant teacher, 500 miles away on the Arizona frontier. As it turns out, everywhere she goes Lily strikes people as being bullheaded. When she is fired from one too many schoolrooms, she heads for Chicago just as World War I comes to a close, but in the flood of returning soldiers, she's unable to find a job. She works as a housemaid for rich people she finds unintelligent, ends up irritating them, floats around the big city with a new friend she will lose, and ends up marrying a traveling salesman. But actually the "crumb-bun" isn't traveling at all, only living across town with another wife and children. So it goes. Lily runs up against hardships and survives them, steeling her resolve to be true to herself and speak her mind. Homesick for the West, she returns to Arizona and becomes known as "the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County." Along the way she meets a lapsed Mormon, makes it clear she won't put up with any funny polygamy business, then asks for his hand in marriage. With Jim Smith at her side, Lily will go on to run liquor during the Prohibition, earn a college degree, learn to fly an airplane, survive the Great Depression and run a 100,000-acre ranch just north of the Juniper Mountains. Most important, she will give birth to the wild, irrepressible Rosemary, who, in turn, will grow up to marry the adorable rake Rex and give birth to four more indomitable children who will face their own travails in the coal hills of West Virginia. Off they will go like a herd of half-broke horses unfit for corral or the open range. Let me take a cue from Lily Casey Smith and speak plainly here: This book is no "Glass Castle." Beyond what we already know about the lives of Rex and Rosemary when we start these pages, there is little sparkle or narrative drive. Too often the prose is flat and unimaginative. There's no one to love, certainly not Lily. And not until Rex appears on Page 248 (a handful of pages before the end), does the dialogue pick up, the author's voice kick into a nice trot and the prose shine. "Half Broke Horses" may be a commendable chronicle of an admirably tough woman on America's western frontier, but a well-crafted work of fiction it is not, and it cannot compare to classic "true-life novels" like Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" or Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." For a great many readers of this book, it probably won't matter. It will be enough to come upon a few sentences such as these and understand how Rosemary learned to tolerate her own slovenliness: "Levi's we didn't wash at all. . . . We wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil -- and then we wore them some more. . . . When [they] reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn't pay a cowboy to let you wash his." It's useful information if you're curious about Jeannette Walls's mother. But the novel itself is too tied to "The Glass Castle" to function well on its own. Every page, every chapter, seems to work only as a prolegomenon to the memoir. That's no way to read a work of fiction. As Rex says to Lily in the last pages of this book, "The problem with being attached to an anchor is it's damned hard to fly."

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

1984 - George Orwell

Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 as a warning about the menaces of totalitarianism. The novel is set in an imaginary future world that is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity. Orwell's warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern political abuses. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred.

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer -- risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

The Seamstress - Sara Tuvel Bernstein

A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania between the wars and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. Ashamed to return home after her expulsion, she looked for work in Bucharest and discovered a talent for dressmaking. That talent--and her blond hair, blue eyes, and overall Gentile appearance--allowed her entry into the highest reaches of Romanian society, albeit as a dressmaker. Bernstein recounts the growing shadow of the native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, a rising tide of anti-Semitic laws, and finally, the open persecution of Romania's Jews. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbrck, a women's concentration camp deep in Germany. Nineteen out of every twenty women transported there died. The author, her sister Esther, and two other friends banded together and, largely due to Sara's extraordinary street smarts and intuition, managed to survive. Although Bernstein was not a professional writer, she tells this story with style and power. Her daughter Marlene contributes a moving epilogue to close out Sara's life. One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"There are many recent accounts of Holocaust victims, but this work stands alone as a testimony to personal strength and an independent spirit." -Library Journal

"Extraordinary." -Booklist

"An engrossing history lesson as well as an important archive." -Faye Kellerman
"Well-told...deserves a prominent place in the archive of Holocaust survival stories." -Publishers Weekly

"One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs" (Kirkus Reviews)

Fault Lines - Nancy Huston

Starred Review. Winner of France's Prix Femina and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Huston's 12th novel captures four generations of a family and examines the decades-long fallout of a dark family secret. The novel proceeds in reverse chronological order from 2004 to 1944 and begins with six-year-old Sol, who is sheltered and coddled by his mother as he immerses himself in all the perversities the Internet can offer. After surgery to remove Sol's congenital birthmark turns out poorly, the extended family takes a trip to great-grandmother Erra's childhood home in Munich. A turbulent history underlies the visit, and after Sol witnesses a tussle between his great-grandmother and great-aunt, the novel skips backwards in time through the childhood of Sol's father, Randall; grandmother Sadie; and finally Erra. Huston's brilliance is in how she gradually lets the reader in on the secret and draws out the revelation so carefully that by the time the reader arrives at the heart of the matter in Munich 1944, the discovery hits with blunt force. Huston masterfully links the 20th century's misery to 21st-century discomfort in razor-sharp portraits of children as they lose their innocence.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go (2005) is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize (an award Ishiguro had previously won in 1989 for The Remains of the Day), for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

The novel describes the life of Kathy H., a young woman of 31, focusing at first on her childhood at an unusual boarding school and eventually her adult life. The story takes place in a dystopian Britain, in which human beings are cloned to provide donor organs for transplants. Kathy and her classmates have been created to be donors, though the adult Kathy is temporarily working as a "carer," someone who supports and comforts donors as they are made to give up their organs and, eventually, submit to death. As in Ishiguro’s other works, the truth of the matter is made clear only gradually, via veiled but suggestive language and situations.

The novel is divided in three parts, chronicling the three phases of the lives of its main characters.

The first part is set at Hailsham, a boarding school where the children are brought up and educated. The teachers there mysteriously encourage the students to produce various forms of art. The best works are chosen by a woman known only as Madame and are said to be collected in a gallery. It is seen that Hailsham is not a normal school by the odd way the teachers or "guardians" treat them, the emphasis on keeping healthy and the fences and boundaries of the school.

While the students of Hailsham are often cliquey and capricious, the three main characters — Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy — develop a close friendship during this time. Kathy herself seems to have resigned herself to being an observer of other people, and the choices they make, instead of making her own choices. She often takes the role of the peacemaker in the clique, especially between Tommy and Ruth. Tommy is an isolated boy who has difficulty in relating to others and is often the target of bullies, while Ruth is an extrovert with strong opinions.

In the second part, the characters, now young adults, move to the "Cottages", residential complexes where they start to have contacts with the external world and they are relatively free to do what they want. A romantic relationship develops between Ruth and Tommy, while Kathy explores her sexuality but without forming any stable relationships. While at the Cottages, they travel to Norfolk. The third part describes Tommy's and Ruth's becoming donors and Kathy's becoming a carer. Kathy cares for Ruth and then, after Ruth "completes" (Ishiguro's evocative euphemism for death), Kathy takes care of Tommy. Before her death, Ruth expresses regret over coming between Kathy and Tommy, and urges them to pursue a relationship with one another, and to seek to defer their donations based on their love. Encouraged by Ruth's last wishes, Kathy and Tommy visit Madame, where they also meet their old headmistress, Miss Emily. During this visit, they learn why artistic production had always been emphasized at Hailsham. They also learn that deferring their donations, a possibility rumoured among clones for many years, is impossible. The clones learn that Hailsham in general was an experiment, an effort to improve the conditions for clones and perhaps alter the attitudes of society, which prefers to view the clones merely as non-human sources of organs. The novel ends, after the death of Tommy, on a note of resignation as Kathy accepts her own inevitable fate as a donor and her eventual "completion."

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn - Alison Weir

Rejecting as myth that Henry VIII, desirous of a son and a new queen, asked his principal adviser Thomas Cromwell to find criminal grounds for executing Anne Boleyn, the prolific British historian Weir (The Six Wives of Henry VIII) concludes that Cromwell himself, seeing Anne as a political rival, instigated one of the most astonishing and brutal coups in English history, skillfully framing her and destroying her faction. Ably weighing the reliability of contemporary sources and theories of other historians, Weir also claims that though perhaps sexually experienced, Anne was technically a virgin before sleeping with Henry. Anne was also, Weir posits, a passionate radical evangelical, with considerable influence over Henry regarding Church reform. Weir wonders if Anne's childbearing history points to her being Rh negative and thus incapable of bearing a second living child. Dissecting four of the most momentous months in world history and providing an eminently judicious, thorough and absorbing popular history, Weir nimbly sifts through a mountain of historical research, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions about Henry's doomed second queen.

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich - Alison Owings

Owings, a freelance television writer who is neither a German nor a Jew, has compiled and edited a groundbreaking set of oral histories. She interviews women from many spectrums of the Third Reich: Germans, Jews, individuals of "mixed" parentage, a countess, a camp guard, women who hid Jews, Nazi supporters, Communists, and other women who witnessed and participated in everyday and extraordinary events. Owings has tried, as much as possible, to quote her interviewees directly yet still manages to create an even and engaging text. This volume is an excellent companion to Claudia Koonz's Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, Family Life, and Nazi Ideology , 1919-1945

A vivid picture of Germany under the Nazis emerges from this collection of unsettling interviews conducted by freelance TV writer Owings with 29 women of diverse backgrounds, both Aryan and Jewish. Among the women whose lives in Germany's war-torn homefront are chronicled are the widow of a resistance leader and the wife of an SS guard, who refers to her husband's work in the Ravensbrook and Buchenwald "manufacturing plants." Not only did Hitler attract the young but, according to one supporter, "he understood how to fascinate women." Some of these women claim that they privately protested mistreatment of Jews and prisoners and risked their lives to assist them. Only one non-Jewish woman, however, admits to "hearing" that Jews were gassed.

ON THE ROAD - Jack Kerouac

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. While many of the names and details of Kerouac's experiences are changed for the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.

When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance" of Kerouac's generation.The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange (1962) is a dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess.

The title is taken from an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange"¹, and alludes to the prevention of the main character's exercise of his free will through the use of a classical conditioning technique. With this technique, the subject’s emotional responses to violence are systematically paired with a negative stimulation in the form of nausea caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of films depicting "ultra-violent" situations. Written from the perspective of a seemingly biased and unapologetic protagonist, the novel also contains an experiment in language: Burgess creates a new speech that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future.

The novel has been adapted for cinema in a controversial movie by Stanley Kubrick, and also by Andy Warhol; adaptations have also been made for television, radio, and the stage. As well as inspiring a concept album, the novel and films are referred to in, and have inspired, a number of songs and bands.

I, Claudius & Claudius the God - Robert Graves

I, Claudius is a novel by English writer Robert Graves, first published in 1934, that deals sympathetically with the life of the Roman Emperor Claudius and cynically with the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's assassination in AD 41. Graves's interpretation of the story owes much to the histories of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, Plutarch, and (especially) Suetonius (Lives of the Twelve Caesars). Graves translated Suetonius before writing the novel. Graves continued his tale (from Claudius's accession after Caligula's death to his death in 54, as well as a sequel involving the early life of Herod Agrippa) in Claudius the God (1935). Both books were adapted by the BBC into an award-winning television serial, I, Claudius.

In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God were written as if they were the rather secret autobiography of the Emperor Claudius, the fourth emperor of Rome (r. 41-54 A.D.). Historically, Claudius was kept out of public life by his family, the Julio-Claudians, until his sudden elevation at the age of 49. This was due to several disabilities, including a stammer, a limp, and various nervous tics which made him appear mentally deficient to his relatives. This is how he was defined by scholars for most of history, and Graves uses these peculiarities to develop a sympathetic character whose survival in a murderous dynasty depends upon the incorrect assumption that he is a harmless idiot.

Robert Graves claimed that after he read Suetonius, Claudius came to him in a dream one night and demanded that his real story be told. The life of Claudius provided Graves with a way to write about the first four emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius) from an intimate point of view. In addition, the real Claudius was a trained historian and is known to have written an autobiography (now lost) in eight books that covered the same time period. I, Claudius is a first-person narrative of Roman history from the reigns of Augustus to Caligula; Claudius the God is written as a later addition documenting Claudius's own reign.

Graves provides a framework for the story by having Claudius describe his visit to Cumae, where he receives a prophecy in verse from the Sibyl, and an additional prophecy contained in a book of "Sibylline Curiosities". The latter concerns the fates of the "hairy ones" (i.e. The Caesars - from the Latin word "caesar", meaning "a fine head of hair") who are to rule Rome. The penultimate verse concerns his own reign, and Claudius assumes that he can tell the identity of the last emperor described. From the outset, then, Graves establishes a fatalistic tone that plays out at the end of Claudius the God, as Nero prepares to succeed Claudius.

At Cumae, the Sibyl tells Claudius that he will "speak clear" nineteen hundred years hence, which he takes to mean that he should write his secret memoirs and leave them to be found by posterity in the 20th Century. He therefore chooses to write in Greek, since he believes that it will remain "the chief literary language of the world." This allows Graves to explore the etymology of Latin words (like the origins of the names "Livia" and "Caesar") that would otherwise be obvious to native Latin speakers, who Claudius (correctly) believes will not exist in the future.

Major themes
Themes treated by the novel include the conflict between liberty (as demonstrated by the Roman Republic, and the dedication to its ideals shown by Augustus and young Claudius), and the stability of Empire and centralized rule (as represented by Livia Drusilla, Herod Agrippa, and the older Claudius). The Republic provided freedom but was inherently unstable and threw the doors open to perennial civil wars, the last of which was ended by Augustus after twenty years of fighting. While Augustus harbours Republican sentiments, his wife Livia manages to convince him that to lay down his Imperial powers would mean the destruction of the peaceful society they have made. Likewise, when the similarly minded Claudius becomes emperor, he is convinced by Valeria Messalina and Herod to preserve his powers, for much the same reason. However, Graves acknowledges that there must be a delicate balance between Republican liberty and Imperial stability; whereas too much of the former led to civil war, too much of the latter led to the corruption of Tiberius, Caligula, Valeria Messalina, Sejanus, Herod Agrippa, Nero, Agrippina the Younger, and countless others – as well as, to a lesser extent, Livia and Claudius himself.

Near the end of Claudius the God, Graves introduces another concept: that when a formerly free nation has lived under a dictatorship for too long, it is incapable of returning to free rule. This is highlighted by Claudius's failed attempts to revive the Republic; by the attempts of various characters to 'restore' the Republic but with themselves as the true rulers; and by Claudius noting that 'by dulling the blade of tyranny, I reconciled Rome to the monarchy' – i.e., in his attempts to rule autocratically but along more Republican lines, he has only made the Roman people more complacent about living under a dictatorship.

The female characters are quite powerful, as in Graves's other works. Livia, Drusilla, Valeria Messalina, and Agrippina the Younger clearly function as the powers behind their husbands, lovers, fathers, brothers, sons and/or daughters. The clearest example is provided by Augustus and Livia: whereas he would have inadvertently caused civil war, she manages, through constant and adroit manipulation, to preserve the peace, prevent a return to the Republic, and keep her own relatives in power. Roman women played little overt role in public life, so the often unpleasant but always significant events supposedly instigated behind the scenes by women allows Graves to develop vital, powerful female characters.

Another common theme throughout the novels is the immediacy and validity of the Roman religion. All prophecies made in the narrative come to pass, from the succession of the Caesars, to the "discovery" of the secret autobiography, to the date of Claudius's death. Religious omens and prophecies function as the major means of foreshadowing in the narrative.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP - John Irving

The story deals with the life of T. S. Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband. She encounters a dying ball turret gunner known only as Technical Sergeant Garp who was reduced to a perpetually priapic mental vegetable by pieces of shrapnel that pierced his head. Jenny rapes Garp in his bedridden, uncomprehending, dying state to impregnate herself, and names the resultant son after him "T. S." (standing only for "Technical Sergeant"). Jenny raises young Garp alone, taking a position at an all-boys school.

Garp grows up, becoming interested in sex, wrestling, and writing fiction—three topics in which his mother has little interest. He launches his writing career, courts and marries the wrestling coach's daughter, and fathers three children. Meanwhile, his mother suddenly becomes a feminist icon after publishing a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as a woman who does not care to bind herself to a man, and who chooses to raise a child on her own).

Garp becomes a devoted parent, wrestling with anxiety for the safety of his children and a desire to keep them safe from the dangers of the world. He and his family inevitably experience dark and violent events through which the characters change and grow. Garp learns (often painfully) from the women in his life (including transsexual ex-football player Roberta Muldoon) struggling to become more tolerant in the face of intolerance. The story is decidedly rich with (in the words of the fictional Garp's teacher) "lunacy and sorrow", and the sometimes ridiculous chains of events the characters experience still resonate with painful truth.

The novel contains several framed narratives: Garp's first novella, The Pension Grillparzer; a short story; and a portion of one of his novels, The World According to Bensenhaver. As well, the book contains some motifs that appear in almost all John Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna, New England, people who are uninterested in having sex, and a complex Dickensian plot that spans the protagonist's whole life. Adultery (another common Irving motif) also plays a large part, culminating in one of the novel's most harrowing and memorable scenes. There is also a tincture of another familiar Irving trope, castration anxiety, most obvious in the lamentable fate of Michael Milton.


John Irving's mother, Frances Winslow, had not been married at the time of his conception,and Irving never met his biological father. As a child, he was not even told anything about his father, and he baited his mother that unless she gave him some information about his biological father, in his writing he would invent the father and the circumstances of how she got pregnant. Winslow would reply, "Go ahead, dear." When The World According to Garp was written, with the protagonist's biological father a comatose but aroused Second World War veteran, Irving was unaware that his own biological father had been in the military.

In 1981, Time magazine quoted the novelist's mother as saying, "There are parts of Garp that are too explicit for me."

Death
Irving concludes the novel by stating, "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." Indeed, throughout the book, Garp seems to be obsessed with death, both in his writing and in his personal life. Garp remarks in a reading that his novella, The Pension Grillparzer, features the death of seven of his nine characters. His third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, features multiple scenes of death and mutilation. However, Garp's writing merely reflects the broader nature of his obsession with necrosis. Garp irrationally fantasizes about ways in which those which he loves might die. At one point Garp rants about his hatred of late-night phone calls—which undoubtedly bring news of a loved one's death. Ironically, several of the people closest to him do die—often in outlandish, even comical ways. In a truly Wildesian sense, Garp's art imitates life, and vice-versa, and his writing drives home the absurdity of a fear of death, as well as the absurdity of death itself.

[edit] Gender roles
Unavoidable in The World According to Garp and in Garp's own writing itself is the treatment of extreme feminism. Garp's mother Jenny Fields finds herself amidst elements of the women's rights movement, and, rejecting almost any interaction with men, is the locus of Irving's feminist overtones. Driven home by her adoption of radical feminists and her absurd New England feminist enclave at Dog's Head Harbor, Irving paints a complicated view of the women's movement. Indeed, Irving oscillates a decidedly unsympathetic view of the overzealous Ellen Jamesians, while vesting in the character of Roberta Muldoon a sanguine portrayal of a transsexual—one who ends up becoming Garp's best friend. Garp's relationship to the feminist movement is also muddled. Garp becomes a reluctant representative of the movement with his third—and most widely read—novel. At the same time, however, he is rejected outright by many feminists and Ellen Jamesians for his work's misogynistic tone.

[edit] Sexuality
Garp's world is one where sexuality — replaced in the book with the nomenclature "lust" — is basically a source of trouble and heartache. Garp's earliest feelings of lust, namely those for a girl, Cushie, result in what are ultimately negative feelings for Garp. Garp's second encounter with lust is with an Austrian prostitute, a relationship which his mother would use as material for national rebuke in her successful autobiography, A Sexual Suspect. In fact, the only character Irving creates without any symptoms of lust is Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, an asexual nurse whose repulsion from sex is highlighted by her conception of Garp himself. As a result, Garp's mother appears as one of the few steady, morally justified characters in the novel—in spite of having committed rape. Although she does have non-consensual sex with the Sergeant, that seems to be the only time where Jenny engages in sexual activity. Irving throws doubt onto Garp's moral compass due to numerous lurid affairs, Garp's marriage through an odd sexual quadrangle with another married couple (a similar situation was the primary focus of Irving's previous novel, The 158-Pound Marriage), and especially Garp's wife, Helen, due to her sexual liaisons. Perhaps the most striking image of the book is the scene in which Irving links Helen's fellating of a young man to the death of her son.

Did the Children Cry: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 - Richard C. Lukas

Based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and prodigious research by the author, who is an expert in the field, this is a unique contribution to the literature of World War II, and a most compelling account of German inhumanity towards children in occupied Poland.

This book is known less for its content than for the controversy that has surrounded it. Nominated for the Janusz Korczak Literary Award, it was subsequently beset with a flurry of Jewish protests. After a spate of bad publicity, and the threat of legal action, the award was belatedly presented--but without any ceremony.

For more detailed info read comments from Jan Peczkis

Someone Named Eva - Joan M. Wolf.

Someone Named Eva is a young adult novel by Joan M. Wolf. It concentrates on the life of Milada, an eleven year old Czech girl, who lives during World War II, after Hitler annexes Czechoslovakia, during the years 1942 - 1945.

Milada Kralicek, a young Czech girl, lived in the village of Lidice, a few miles away from Prague. In May, she celebrated her eleventh birthday. She received a telescope as gift from her father, because she loved gazing at the stars. Her best friend, Terezie, Zelenka and Hana and a classmate, Ruzha attended the birthday. A few days later, the Nazis soldiers came to their house, taking Milada, her mother, her younger sister Anechka and her grandmother away. Her father and Jaroslav, Milada's older brother were separated from the rest of the family and taken somewhere else.tuzset

Milada, her mother, grandmother and Anechka were held together with the rest of female inhabitants of Lidice in a school building of Kladno. For having straight blond hair and light-colored eyes, Milada fitted the Aryan ideal. She is sent to a Lebensborn center outside of Pucshkau,Poland along with Ruzha and several Polish girls. She is renamed Eva, and Ruzha is renamed Franziska. The camp is brutal, and she works hard to remember her name Milada. But as hard as she works to remember, Franziska works to forget as Ruzha fades to a shadow. She spends years around other Aryan girls including Siegrid,Ilsa,Gerde,Leisel(who Eva befriends, learning her real name is Katarzyna),Heidi(who is sent off to a concentration camp after speaking Polish), and Heidi's sister Elsa(who is sent away shortly after Heidi).The camp and its staff seem cheerful on the outside,but appear to be hiding something unpleasant.

Once judged sufficiently trained, she was adopted by a German family from Fürstenberg near Berlin. The Werner family was composed of Vater, (father in German) who was a high official at the Nazi government, Mutter (mother), Elsbeth and Peter, her adoptive sister and brother. They lived in a very large house, where Eva enjoyed her own room. She was well treated, helping Eva to develop quite positive relations with her new family. The only strange feature she noticed was a horrible smell that penetrated the house nearly all the time.

One day, as she walked around the house with Elsbeth, Eva heard the Czech anthem being sung. Coming closer, she discovered a concentration camp with female prisoners singing in Czech. This brought back all the memories, enabling Milada to see clearly who she really was. Elsbeth explained to her that this was the Ravensbruck concentration camp and that her Vater was the head of the camp. Eva/Milada had some strange feelings that possibly her family could have been detained in this camp, meaning that all that time she could have been so close to her family.

By April 1945, the Nazi were losing on all the war fronts and Berlin was encircled by the Russian troops. Vater and Peter decided to go hiding, while Mutter, Elsbeth and Eva moved to a shelter made in the basement to protect themselves. In May Russians soldiers came and asked for the papers left by Vater in his office, but Mutter told them that she was not aware of anything. They left without causing any harm to a family that had done so much damage.

A few days later, Hitler was declared dead and the war was over. Eva, Elsbeth and Mutter decided to fix up and clean the house, trying to survive in the new situation.

Some time after, two representatives of the Red Cross Associaton came to the house and announced that Milada's mother was alive and launched a search after her daughter. Eva recognized that she was the person they were looking for. At that moment Eva was Milada again. She was taken back to Czechoslovakia.

She met her mother in Prague, discovering that her mother was indeed detained in Ravensbruck, a few steps away from the Werner household. Milada also learned that sadly her father and brother Jaroslav were killed by the German Nazi the same day after they were separated and that her grandma died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She was also told that her sister Anechka got separated from her mother and taken away and that the red cross are looking for her. Her close friend Terezie was killed in Poland.

As their house, as well as all other houses in Lidice, were completely devastated by the Germans, Milada and her mother lived since then at house of their distant cousin in Prague. Milada had to learn the Czech nearly from scratch. Milada and her mother got closer again as they were telling each other what had happened during the horrific times of their separation. Finally, Milada managed to recover her true identity and pride.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - Stieg Larsson

Two seriously injured people arrive at the emergency ward of the Sahlgrensa hospital in Gothenburg. One is the wanted murderer Lisbeth Salander who has taken a bullet to the head and needs immediate surgery, the other is Alexander Zalachenko, an older man who Lisbeth has attacked with an axe.

In this third novel in the Millennium trilogy, Lisbeth is planning her revenge against the men who tried to kill her, and even more importantly, revenge against the government which nearly destroyed her life. But first she must escape from the intensive care unit and exculpate her name from the charges of murder that hangs over her head.


In order to succeed with the latter, Lisbeth will need the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. He is writing an exposing article that will shake the Swedish government, the secret service and the whole country by its foundations. Finally there is a chance for Lisbeth Salander to put her past behind her and finally there is a chance for truth and justice to prevail.

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY - Audrey Niffenegger

In the second half of the 19th century, Londoners enjoyed a form of recreation that today might seem grisly: a Sunday stroll through one of the vast graveyards beyond the city center. The new burial grounds were established to move ­corpses out of the metropolitan churchyards, where they had contaminated the groundwater; these cemeteries were at once gardens, social centers and museums of statuary, a sort of theme park bristling with monuments to lost loves and individual hubris. They ultimately bore the same message one might hear in church: No matter how we try, our human endeavors end in death. It was not uncommon to find a family picnicking among the headstones.

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.

Obsession is the order of the day. Niffenegger digs deep into various forms of love, including the oppressive closeness between both pairs of twins and the beyond-the-grave ardor of Elspeth and Robert. There’s also the outright ­obsessive-compulsive disorder that confines another likable neighbor, Martin, to his apartment. Martin’s otherwise loving wife leaves him because of his physical rituals and emotional tics, the hoards of boxed-up belongings and the bleach-chapped hands that are figures for any kind of drive that takes over body and soul.

Robert’s obsession with Highgate means he has “lost all perspective” and let his thesis grow to more than 1,400 pages. In her own career, Niffenegger has written roughly as many pages that prove she is a daring, inventive and immensely appealing writer. Her runaway first book, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” is the story of two Chronos-crossed lovers whose meetings and partings are beyond their control; her illustrated novels, “The Three Incestuous Sisters” and “The Adventuress,” mix equal parts fairy tale and gothic romance. Each of these is a high-concept tour de force, with the flashiness that the term implies; each one is also an incantation to primal desires and horrors. In the present case, is anything more alluring than twins or more cathected than a ghost?

Death comes with its own set of rules. Elspeth’s spirit is unable to leave her old apartment, so she hides in a desk drawer and gains strength by teaching herself how to haunt. Eventually she will write in dust and manipulate a Ouija board, assuming the appearance of “the body she had died in, thin and scarred by needle holes.” She is not one to let the physical defeat her, even when her preternaturally gorgeous American nieces (who resemble a young Elspeth and her own twin) move in and slowly befriend a bewildered and grieving Robert.

The description of those nieces, Julia and Valentina, might fit a pair of funerary statues: short, thin and pale, with white-blond hair and a tendency to hold each other’s hands. They mirror each other even inside, where Valentina’s heart sits on the right rather than the left and symmetry causes her a number of life-threatening health problems. Valentina is known as the nicer sister; perhaps inevitably, Robert finds himself falling for her, as she does for him. He is then in the awkward position of loving two women — one a living virgin, the other a phantom with an agenda. When Robert says of Elspeth’s ghost, “her ideas have other ideas hiding inside them,” it is an ominous observation, especially as Valentina enlists her help to break away from Julia.

Niffenegger’s characters are selfish, messy, vulnerable and sometimes crazed, all under the attractive veneer of artistic and contemplative impulses. They don’t live up to what others might consider their potential. Valentina wants to be a fashion designer but allows Julia’s lack of ambition and general bossiness to keep her in a kind of perpetual adolescence. Martin is brilliant at languages, but his O.C.D.-­imposed confinement means he translates digitally submitted texts and constructs elaborate crossword puzzles destined to die along with the daily paper.

Even the most self-absorbed characters win a deep compassion; it’s possible to root for every one, even as you want to shake some sense into them all. When he thinks of his wife, Martin misses her “roundness, he loved the warmth and heft and curve of her”; he even misses her snoring. Prickly Julia has her moments of kindness as she tries to help Martin. In part because of this emotional generosity, the novel is intimately and subtly humorous, as lovers banter and the narrative voice winks at human frailty. Put on a plummy British accent to pronounce “symmetry” and “cemetery” and discover a pun in the title.

The ending depends on some unsettling authorial choices. With two sets of twins and the supernatural in play, there are sure to be buried secrets and cases of mistaken identity. Although there are plenty of hints along the way, it may be helpful to draw a chart to track the inevitable reversals. Valentina’s plan for escape is fantastical, its execution shocking — all to the author’s credit. “Symmetry” rises above concept and into the heady air of artistry, where just about anything is believable.

When Robert began his thesis, he envisioned Highgate as “a prism through which he could view Victorian society at its most sensationally, splendidly, irrationally excessive . . . a theater of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose.” In this novel, it is much more than that, a place where the symmetry of a prism yields to the natural and emotional forces that distort the careful plans of cemetery designers and, by extension, anyone who dares to feel. The growth of tree roots raises a gravestone off the ground; a jealous prank changes life (and death) for two generations of twins. Repose is overrated anyway.

Lovers of Niffenegger’s past work should rejoice. This outing may not be as blindly romantic as “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” but it is mature, complex and convincing — a dreamy yet visceral tale of loves both familial and erotic, a search for Self in the midst of obsession with an Other. “Her Fearful Symmetry” is as atmospheric and beguiling as a walk through Highgate itself.