Marx's grave backdrop for $5m US book sensation
Paul Harris in New York in guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 March 2009

Audrey Niffeneger's new novel is set in Highgate cemetery. Photograph: Paul Grover/Rex Features

It was a deal that set America's publishing industry alight. In the face of a deep recession, Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife, scored an advance of almost $5m last week for her second novel.
But the twist in the tale was the ­surprise setting for the hotly anticipated work: Highgate cemetery in north ­London. The graveyard that provides the last resting place of Karl Marx is the central plank on which Niffenegger's new work rests, providing the background for her supernatural-tinged novel about American twins who unexpectedly end up living in London.

The book, Her Fearful Symmetry, has been one of the most eagerly sought-after works in recent publishing history. The commercial success of Niffenegger's first novel had created a wave of expectation that saw almost every major ­publishing house put in a bid for her new book. The firm that emerged victorious from the ensuing scrap was Scribner, part of Simon & Schuster, which ­eventually forked out an eye-watering $4.8m (£3.4m).

Not surprisingly there is a buzz of hype surrounding the new novel, for which expectations will now be huge. The publishing industry has been hard hit by the economic crisis and the size of Niffenegger's advance has defied ­predictions that the age of such colossal deals was over. Nan Graham, the Scribner editor who sealed the deal, described the book as superb. "She really has defied custom and written a spectacular second novel, which is one of the hardest things to do in the universe," she told the New York Times.

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