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Simon & Schuster
October 2018
On Sale: October 16, 2018
304 pages
ISBN: 1501166786
EAN: 9781501166785
Kindle: B074ZDRGBC
Trade Size / e-Book
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Hardcover (February 2018)
Coming of Age
The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry, hailed as βextraordinaryβ by The New York Times, βa brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and warβ by The Wall Street Journal, and βa literary phenomenonβ 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, βFolly,β 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, βFollyβ also suggests an aspiring novelistβs coming-of-age. By contrast, βMadnessβ 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 βa transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas, and a politically engaged work of metafictionβ (The New York Times Book Review), and a βmasterpieceβ in the original sense of the wordβ (The Atlantic). Lisa Hallidayβs novel will captivate any reader with while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.
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