I keep meaning to read
The Time Traveler's Wife, or go see the movie, but neither of these has happened. Nevertheless, I jumped into another book by that book's author, Audrey Niffenegger, and am now re-motivated to find
TTW.
Her Fearful Symmetry is an intriguing ghost story, filled with dysfunctional but mostly sympathetic characters, set in London in contemporary times. It opens with the loss of a love. Robert Fanshaw is writing the penultimate history of a nearby and venerable cemetary, Highgate, where lie buried some eminent remains, e.g., Karl Marx and Michael Faraday. His older lover, Elspeth Noblin, dies of cancer, but eventually finds that her spirit is still alive and aware and trapped in her old flat, one floor below Robert's. On the top floor of the building lives Martin, who has also been abandoned by a very much alive but fed up wife who can no longer cope with the restrictions imposed by her husband's obsessive compulsive disorder. Elspeth has left a peculiar bequest. Her flat and estate is to go to twin nieces, Valentina and Julia, who she has never met. The conditions of the will are that they must live in the flat for one year before disposing of her estate, and they must never allow their parents into the flat. Their mother was Elspeth's estranged twin. Until this time, the twins have never ventured very far from their home in a posh suburb of Illinois, except for a couple of abortive attempts at college. The plot thickens as the twins arrive and begin to grow apart, Elspeth finds she can make her presence known in increasingly obvious ways, Robert begins to fall in love with Valentina who is perhaps not really Elspeth's niece, Julia befriends Max and starts slipping him drugs, and a wild kitten is temporarily tamed before its spirit is stolen. The plot is ingenious and you won't know all the intricate twists until the end.
