When Elspeth Noblin dies she leaves her beautiful even overlooking Highgate Cemetery to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina Poole, on the condition that their mother is never allowed to cross the threshold. But until the solicitor’s letter falls through the entranceway of their suburban American home, either Julia nor Valentina understood their aunt existed. The twins wish that in London their personal, separate, lives can finally start but they do not know that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, through the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them with their aunt’s strange and elusive lover who lives below them and functions in the cemetery itself.

As the twins unravel the secrets of their aunt, who doesn’t seem quite ready to keep her flat, actually after death, Niffenegger weaves collectively a delicious and deadly ghost story about love, reduction and identity.