Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Jonathan Cape

Evil twins?
Eerie twins anyway: Elspeth and Edie, identical and inseparable, had a catastrophic row sometime in the 1980s. Edie, it seems, split for Chicago and married Jack, father of her twins, Julie and Valentina.
Wow, twins within twins
And wheels within wheels. Elspeth dies, and leaves her flat beside Highgate Cemetery in London to her nieces. So Julie and Valentina head for London, to live in the flat for a year.
Oooh, wish someone would do that for me
Careful what you wish for, babes. Elspeth isn’t a very nice person. The girls move in. Upstairs are Martin and Marijke, downstairs is Robert, who was Elspeth’s lover.
All pair off neatly?
Not so. Martin suffers terribly from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and as we meet her, Marijke is leaving him because she can’t stand to live this way - she can’t even enter the flat without platic bags over her feet.
Bags? What?
To keep the place super-clean. Meanwhile, Robert - much younger than his late lover, and haunted by the astonishing similarity between the new twins and Elspeth, is fascinated by them.
Good thing she can’t see that
Ah, but she can. Elspeth has awoken as a ghost in the flat. And from then on it gets weirder and weirder. Niffenegger, author of cult bestseller The Time Traveler’s Wife (Now a Major Movie) and other hits, knows how to spring a stunning surprise.
And does it end happily?
It does. A wonderful ending - though it comes after quite a long saggy time in the middle of the book where I was muttering “Ah, get on with it”.
And shockingly?
Certainly that. You’ll puff out your cheeks and go “Whoo, wasn’t expecting that at several points.
Good characters?
I particularly liked the Little Kitten of Death, a feral white kitten that comes in from the graveyard and is captured by the ghost and the twins. And the cemetery staff are nice old codgers.

Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill

Quercus

Quirky Commie murders?
Back in 1978 the aged Dr Siri Paiboun, hero of the Laos revolution and now national coroner, is about to become a married man and father of two at the ripe old age of seventysomething.
Hardy man
Indeed. Not only has Dr Siri been snaffled off the shelf by an aged beauty, a former comrade in arms, he’s also forced to attend the Communist Party’s Quarterly Planning and Progress Conference.
A thousand flowers will bloom
And he’s being haunted by ghostly American thugs who chase him down the dark streets of an otherworld ‘hood sneering racial insults.
Where does the pogo stick come in?
What? Oh, the title? The toy is worshipped by Hmong hill people. Someone brought it home from a war and it caused mayhem - all the kids fought over it. Convinced it was demonically possessed, the tribe set it up with its own shrine.
And sure why not?
While Dr Siri is up in the hills with the pogo stick worshippers, his assistants - lovely Dtui, and Mr Geung, whose Down’s Syndrome makes him particularly efficient as Dr Siri’s assistant - are trying to thaw out a suspicious deep-frozen corpse.
Where do writers get these ideas?
My question exactly. But this series of books about Dr Siri have a sweet, feelgood vibe that’s kindly and reassuring. The characters are all good people, except the ones who are satisfyingly bad.
And tell me this, what’s a communist doing being haunted?
You know how it is with occupied countries - it’s not just the country that gets occupied. Soon the citizens are culturally colonised too. Dr Siri has become the habitation of a thousand-year-old shaman, who is a magnet for bad guys from the spirit world.
Best thing you’ve ever read?
Wouldn’t quite go that far. But if you want a sweet and fuzzy book with plenty of gentle laughs, this is the one for you.
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