The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my favorite books in recent years. And now Chicago author Audrey Niffenegger will be chatting about her new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, with Victoria Lautman on Thursday, November 19th. And I will be in Mexico. When I planned my winter getaway and realized I’d miss this event, which has been on my calendar for ages, I thought about not going on vacation. Really, I did. So, dear writers, please attend this event in my absence and be sure to share all the deets! Here’s the fine print about this awesome evening with a brilliant writer:
Artist and author Audrey Niffenegger, whose debut novel The Time Traveler’s Wife became a publishing sensation, takes the stage at Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman Thursday, November 19th to chat about the long-awaited follow-up, Her Fearful Symmetry. The free, hour-long interview is a partnership between the Chicago Public Library and 98.7WFMT radio, with a taping at 6:00 p.m. in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State Street. The interview will be broadcast at noon on Sunday, November 27th. Seminary Co-Op Book Store sells books at the event, which is underwritten by Graver Capital Management LLC. The events are free, no reservations required, with seating on a first-come basis.
Set in and around London’s atmospheric Highgate Cemetery, the story has all the ingredients of a Victorian thriller – graves, ghosts, creaky old buildings, dusty books, extremely odd people, and passion in many forms – all knit together into a detailed, often humorous contemporary framework that originates near Chicago. Identical, inseparable American twins Valentina and Julia inherit the Highgate apartment of aunt Elspeth – their own mother’s identical twin whom they have never met. The young twins are naïve and indolent at age 21, and in order to gain their inheritance, they’re required to live in the flat for one year, without their parents. Off they go to London, where they soon acquire some of their aunt’s unusual pals: upstairs neighbor Martin, a shut-in with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Robert, Elspeth’s bereaved younger lover who is also a Highgate Cemetery expert. They also inherit Elspeth’s ghost, whose presence becomes more pronounced and influential in startlingly unpredictable ways. A paranormal story of love, identity, and obsession, Her Fearful Symmetry has been hailed as “frighteningly smart” and “deliciously creepy,” while “lovers of Niffenegger’s past work should rejoice” in this supernatural tale.
Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist, writer, and professor who teaches at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, which she helped found in 1994. Her first books, illustrated with her own prints, were hand-bound in editions of ten, and while she first imagined The Time Traveler’s Wife as a graphic novel, she eventually wrote it as her first “traditional” book. Published in 2003, the novel has sold several million copies and was recently produced as a movie. Two of Niffenegger’s earlier “novels-in-pictures” have been published commercially (The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress), while her graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile was recently serialized by the London Guardian.
