Her hair is still dyed red from the time she decided that to fully comprehend Claire’s character, the protagonist of The Time Traveler’s Wife, she had to heighten the resemblance between herself and this fictional woman as much as possible—Audrey Niffenegger's dedication is immediately evident. The obscure visual artist had spent 14 years producing ten handmade copies of her graphic novel The Three Incestuous Sisters and another seven years writing a novel that she was struggling to get published before she finally achieved success. In 2004, when she had almost given up hope, suddenly The Time Traveler’s Wife became an international bestseller, selling over six million copies.

You might be more familiar with the film adaptation produced by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston released last September. There has been considerable contention surrounding the movie, given the liberties taken with the original plot. Audrey Niffenegger does not have much to say on the matter as she has not seen film and has no intention to do so.

"I read bits of the script but that’s all. I am a control freak and it was hard letting go, and not taking part. The producers did their own thing. I don’t know what they have changed and I don’t really want to. I know that if I went to see the film Claire and Henry would just become Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in my mind," says Niffenegger.

If you are expecting a sequel to the novel or even a story remotely like it, you will be disappointed. Although she flinches at my comment on the cynicism noticeable in her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry, she still admits that this ghost story is much more sinister than her previous novel.

"The characters earn what they deserve. The more selfish the characters are, the more grim what happens to them is. It is not cynical but it certainly is much darker and complex than The Time Traveler’s Wife."

An image came to her mind in 1997, before she had finished writing The Time Traveler’s Wife, that of "a man who can’t leave his flat and is visited by a woman" and this was the birth of Her Fearful Symmetry. The story later became a ghost story, but more by accident than anything else.

"The girl who was visiting the man in his flat had a roommate and because I was inspired at the time by Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which is the story of two girls who look strangely alike, I decided to turn the roommate into a twin. I wanted them to live near Highgate Cemetery in London. But then I thought, if the flat looks onto Highgate there is no way these girls could afford to live there. They had to have inherited it from someone, an aunt. The aunt is the typical Victorian cliché. The problem was that Elspeth, their aunt, was a very interesting character, the way I imagined her anyway, and I was not sure what to do since I had killed her off before the story even started. So she came back as a ghost trapped in her flat."

Elspeth’s strange stipulations in her will that the twins must live in the flat for a year before they can sell it and that their parents must not set foot on the property set the story in motion. The increasingly unbearable situation which ensues—the omnipresence of Elspeth’s ghost and her constant interference in the lives of her nieces and bereaved lover, Robert—brings all the characters to breaking point.

"Robert, her lover, says, late in the novel, that the longer Elspeth is dead, the less human she is. The thing she is losing is empathy and she’s becoming more and more selfish as she goes along. She does end up literally destroying lives."

The story was not originally meant to be set in London but in Chicago where Niffenegger has been living for years. She went to London in 1996 and, being a self-titled ‘graveyard tourist’ and a lover of everything Victorian, decided to visit Highgate. As this was "the coolest cemetery" she had ever been to, her story had to be set in London. Of course she needed permission to have unlimited access to the cemetery for her research and contacted the chair of The Friends of Highgate, the organization who runs the cemetery, eighty-two year old Jean Pateman.

"Jean is very protective of the cemetery and when I phoned I had not published anything yet. I introduced myself very enthusiastically talking about my book but what I didn’t know is that she got six calls like this every day and she just said"—Niffenegger puts on a very posh London accent—"'Oh my dear, I don’t think that would be a very good idea'. But it did happen in the end, though Jean gave me a couple of rules: no sex scenes in the cemetery and not too much swearing in the novel! Jean is great and I based one of the characters, Jessica, on her."

For her research Niffenegger tried to think and breathe British. She became herself a tour guide in Highgate—still volunteering there when she has the time—and tried to write British English consistently, hounding out Americanisms, and even describes her protagonists watching an episode of Doctor Who drooling over David Tennant’s otherworldly charms.

"It was actually an episode based on The Time Traveler’s Wife. About a man who time travels and comes to see a woman at different times in her life. I heard about it and watched it. Now I love Doctor Who, it’s a great show. I loved the Agatha Christie episode with the giant wasp," she adds enthusiastically.

When asked what they are working on at the moment or planning to do next, writers often look at their interviewer in shocked horror as if they had been asked about their sexual life, but Niffenegger replies simply: "I am working on a short story which I will hopefully turn into a novel. It’s called, for now at least, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile. It’s the story of nine-year old girl called Lizzie who has hypertrichosis, also known as the Werewolf Syndrome. Her parents died in a circus fire and she is raised by her aunt. I am obsessed with aunt," she says laughing. "She is home-schooled and it’s about her wanting to go to school and see the world."

This story, like Her Fearful Symmetry is much less mainstream than The Time Traveler’s Wife.

"When my friends read The Time Traveler’s Wife they said 'We don’t recognize you in this' but when they read Her Fearful Symmetry they said 'Now we recognize you'. It’s not as modern, it’s from another time, more Victorian. It is more like me."