A
TIME
and
NEW YORK TIMES
TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR *
New York Times
Notable Book and
Times
Critic’s Top Book of 2018
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY *
Elle
*
Bustle
Kirkus Reviews
Lit Hub
* NPR *
O, The Oprah Magazine
Shelf Awareness
The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday, hailed as
“extraordinary” by
The
, “a brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war” by
The Wall Street Journal
, and “a literary phenomenon” by
The New Yorker.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections,
Asymmetry
explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, “Folly,” tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, “Folly” also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, “Madness” is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.
A stunning debut from a rising literary star,
is “a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas, and a politically engaged work of metafiction” (
The New York Times Book Review
), and a “masterpiece” in the original sense of the word” (
The Atlantic
). Lisa Halliday’s novel will captivate any reader with while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.