Asymmetry

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Richard Gere and Diana Silvers. A Time and New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year * New York Times Notable Book and Times Critic’s Top Book of the Year NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF The Year BY * Elle * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * LitHub * NPR * Oprah Daily The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday is “a brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war” (The Wall Street Journal). Told in two 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 explores Alice’s artistic aspirations and growing frustrations of living in Ezra’s shadow. 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 “a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas, and a politically engaged work of metafiction” (The New York Times Book Review), and a “literary phenomenon” (The New Yorker). Lisa Halliday’s novel will captivate any reader with while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

Lisa Halliday is an American writer who received a Whiting Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books. Her first novel, Asymmetry, has been published in twenty languages and was named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and many other publications. Asymmetry was also one of President Obama’s favorite books of the year and was shortlisted for several prizes including a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Prix du Premier Roman. Lisa grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Milan, Italy, with her husband and daughter. Since 2023, she has served as Literary Executor of The Estate of Louise Glück.