Asymmetry (Hardback)

'Lisa Halliday's first novel is the rarest of literary beasts: a work with proper avant-garde credentials whose warmest reception might be among gossip columnists.' - The Sunday Times

In New York, Alice, a young editor, begins an affair with Ezra Blazer, a world-famous, much older writer. At Heathrow airport, Amar, an Iraqi-American economist en route to Kurdistan, finds himself detained for the weekend. What draws these characters together, and how do their lives connect, if at all?

Playful and inventive, tender and humane, Asymmetry is a novel which illuminates the power plays and imbalances of contemporary life - between young and old, West and Middle East, fairness and injustice, talent and luck, and the personal and the political.

In her debut work of fiction, Lisa Halliday brings a certain degree of knowing autobiography into a tale of a young woman's relationship with a much-older writer, having previously publically discussed her relationship with Philip Roth, conducted in her twenties. Asymmetry however is no crude tell-all, but instead a subtly-observed chronicle of control and power, slipping into the daringly experimental with its final section audaciously set around Ezra Blazer’s appearance on Desert Island Discs. Recommended.