Skip to main content

About the Book

About the Book

Asymmetry

The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday, ASYMMETRY, hailed as “extraordinary” by The New York Times, “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, ASYMMETRY is an urgent, important and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

Audiobook available; read by Aden Hakim, Fiona Hardingham, Arthur Morey and Candace Thaxton

Asymmetry
by Lisa Halliday

  • Publication Date: October 16, 2018
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • ISBN-10: 1501166786
  • ISBN-13: 9781501166785