I received a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

I meditation on the interconnectedness of life and it's complexity -- with seemingly disparate characters revealing connections over time, and the lack of equanimity of how people are treated based on their circumstances.

A complex narrative that brings a writer to life with all of his literary accolades. The sense and flow of dialogue is strong but the connection between parts one and two left me baffled. The third part, an interview with Ezra was my favorite part of the book.

Copy provided by the Publisher and NetGalley

Fascinating 3 part novel. I finished it in a day and was pleasantly surprised by the thread that wove all the parts together. As I learned more about the authors personal story and its significance for the story she ended up writing in Asymmetry I found it more intriguing. Overall a great read for contemporary fiction fans and will be recommending to readers!

3.5. Disappointing read. This book consisted of three short stories, the first and third centered around an irascible, older egotistical famous author, Ezra Blazer, and a young woman editor, Alice, whose goal was to be a writer. However, we know very little about Alice other than being involved with Ezra. In other words, it is all about the all knowing Ezra. The second story, and more interesting to me, was about an Iraqi American detained at London’s Heathrow Airport and his thoughts about his life. I found this story more purposeful and noteworthy, and wish it had been made into a novel. The asymmetry focus if this book is simply not worth searching for. Three disjointed stories, not a novel in any real sense. This book came with a lot of rave reviews and fanfare, likely because the author was a protege of Philip Roth. And in all honesty, I am not a fan of Roth so perhaps that is why the purpose of this book (or novel) has evaded me. Ms. Halliday’s prose is excellent but found the purpose or focus of this novel murky at best.

Assymetry requires the reader to think through complicated relationships and ambiguous connections. It requires the reader to think about their place in the world. Divided into three parts, the novel is experimental, spare and gorgeous.

Alice is an editor for a New York publishing house during the second Bush presidency. Amar is an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow airport in 2008. While at first, the two novellas seem unrelated, as both Alice and Amar's stories unfold, their connection is explained during a radio interview during the third section of the book. In a book that focuses specifically on characters, we see their pasts and present, their similarities and vast differences.

With Alice, in Folly, the reader is given a front row seat to her affair with an older, well-published author, Ezra Blazer. Alice examines the differences in their lives: his ability to do what he wants, his success at writing, their views on love, and his coming to terms with his mortality and her want to be immortal. What makes Alice's story especially interested is seeing the publishing world from both sides of the table. On one side, there is the highly successful, award-winning male author who is eager to share his wisdom with his young lover. On the other, Alice shares her frustrations with being gate-keeper instead of writer but sees what an author's life can become. One moment that stuck out especially was her finding an advanced reader's copy of a book in Ezra's bathroom garbage with a blurb request attached to the front. This echoed Alice's own concerns that no story she'd be able to tell would ever be important enough. 

In Madness, Amar is struggling to come to terms with his dual-identity as an American and an Iraqui. Laced between moments of his interaction with security at Heathrow airport in London, we see Amar's flashbacks of growing up in America, his time spent in London, and his previous visits to Iraq. He, like Alice, calls New York City home: this is where he grew up. Went to school. Fell in and out of love. But what he understands that security sees is only one aspect of his identity: the Iraqui citizenship, his skin color, the assumption of his religion. In the holding room at Heathrow, he notices a Koran and an arrow pointing to Mecca, but doesn't dare pray for fear he'll be detained even longer. 

What Lisa Halliday creates in Asymmetry is a multi-layered conversation about the state of publishing today, about the way we tell stories, and inherent privilege that comes with gender, age, race, and nationality. Crafted using quotes from other famous literary tomes, Halliday has written an intellectually stimulating character study that forces the reader to come to terms with how they view the post 9-11 world.

This book came out of nowhere, for me. It's a very clever book constructed into three parts: two novellas and what is labeled a "coda" as the third and final. On the surface is seems that the first two novellas have nothing in common but there are several connections that you realize as you keep reading. Brilliant!

Not my kind of story, hard to relate and get into the characters and ultimately I didn't want to invest any more time in them.

This book left me....bewildered. I thought the first half was OK -- one of those plots where nothing really happens, but it was interesting enough. And then I read the second half, and it was pretty much the same -- or at least what happened was presented in a pretty ho hum way. And then the implication was that the last section would tie everything together. Well, unless I missed something major, I just didn't get it.

Not every book is for every person, but I usually do a decent job of picking out what I would like. And this wasn't bad -- necessarily -- I just didn't understand what the book was trying to say. It's like the piece of art that everyone raves about and then you see it, and it just doesn't move you. It's an Amazon Best Book of the Month, so there are certainly people raving about this, but it wasn't for me.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I love the title of this book, and all of its implications. Old/young. Powerful/powerless. Male/Female. Rich/Poor. First world/Third world.

At first I was annoyed when the story switched. I was being taken away from a plot before I felt like it was resolved. It took me awhile to enter Amar’s world. When I did, I was completely there, only wondering what happened to Ezra in the way you idly think about an old high school friend. On the return to Ezra at the end, though. I felt cheated out of some resolution from *either* story.


Still, though, the story-telling was excellent and I wanted something more from these characters I had come to like.

3.5 stars.

Hmm, this was an unusual book. The novel is centered on the romance between twenty something year old Alice and a Prize winning author at least four decades her senior. Halliday's writing has been described as 'elegant' and it is not difficult to see why. The prose is unusual and the premise of the book is even more so. It is divided into three parts: Folly, Madness and Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs. Folly, which is undoubtedly my favorite section, focuses on Ezra and Alice's relationship. Halliday writes this part so exquisitely, her tender depiction of their love story makes you almost forget that Ezra is aged, old enough to be Alice's grandfather.

Madness is the story of Iraqi-American Amar, who is detained at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Baghdad. It is hard to find a true, visible intersection of both stories and I believe this is why many readers might have to do a bit of decoding. The final part is a final interview with Ezra Blazer.

Let me break it you: this book is odd. Superbly paced and virtually a page turner at the start, the second part is full of political jargon and seems almost entirely disconnected from the first. Still, the storytelling is always fascinating. I hated that I read the entire second segment WAITING for a big intersection that never really happened. If you're feeling for something unusual, but well written, try this.

I love a book that draws me in. A book where I really get to know the characters and want to know what happens to them. I did not feel any of that with Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. I really didn’t care about the characters because i really didn’t like them and I just wasn’t drawn to them.

Asymmetry is a novel in 3 parts. The first part is about a young woman, Alice, who has an affair with a very much older Pulitzer Prize winner, Ezra Blazer. I did not relate to these two characters and nothing really seemed to happen. The second part is the story of Amor an Iraqi American who is held up in an airport in England. This story was a bit more interesting as it showed the immigrant experience and what it is like for those of Middle Eastern descent. The story did weave in and out of different times in Amor’s life and I found it a bit confusing. I did enjoy learning about life in Iraq and reading of the perspective of regular people just trying to live in the country they were born in. The third section is an interview with Ezra Blazer, the writer from the first story. In this section we learn a bit more about the life of Ezra.

I think that Asymmetry is a book not so much about the emotional experience but about the literary experience. I may come back to it sometime in the future to look more closely for themes and connections which I wasn’t doing at all because I was trying to get connected with the characters. I think looking for themes and connections with give me a very different reading experience than trying to emotionally connect with the book.

If crass language bothers you then skip this book. If you like a book where you can look for connections and themes and symbols you might want to give this book a try.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

DNF at 50%. It was trying too hard to be "important", but was a slog to get through, and came across as pseudo-intellectual.

challenging. This is an interesting but not always likable book that merges two novellas with a bit at the end. Alice and the much older Ezra have a relationship you could see as creepy, especially when you read the coda. He's an unrepentant man. Alice is a woman at sea who needs to grow up. Amar is in the odd position of being an America of Iraqi descent who is in a holding pen at Heathrow in 2o08. His musings are not unique but he was, to me, the most sympathetic character. How do these three people link up? The result was not entirely satisfying to me but I appreciate that Halliday tried something different. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is for fans of literary fiction.

This is a hard one to do my quasi reviews on without giving it away but here it goes.
This is a story told in 3 novellas 2 of which I could see a clear correlation but I didn't immediately see how the 2nd was connected to the larger picture.
The writing was excellent and I really enjoyed the metafictional aspects, and literary references sprinkled largely throughout the first novella.
The second part of this story was a very interesting way of showing the unfairness of the world outside the US as a man is detained in an airport in the UK for being a perceived threat.
I didn't really enjoy the third part much but it did it's job of connecting the novel as a whole.
I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in modern literature and trying to find the interconnectedness of the world and the obstacles blocking unity.
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc through netgalley.

This one lost me right away. The relationship that forms in the beginning of the book creeped me out. I am not interested in reading about this story. Like another reviewer, I’m alloting 3 stars because I did not finish and felt to give a rating feels unfair.

OK, I seem to be on a rough run, review-wise, and it's starting to wear on me. This is yet another book that I thought sounded so interesting and that turned out to lose me COMPLETELY... I will grant that the book was original - I have not read anything like it. I will grant that Halliday is a strong writer - there were some very lovely (and some equally disturbing) sections in the text that were resonant and poignant and pointed and sharply spot-on. But I can't grant that this was a success for me, overall, because I never felt like I understood why the three pieces were all in one book...

Asymmetry. I get the concept. But the "new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda" never found their way to me, I guess, because I finished the book with a gigantic crease in my brow and absolutely no sense as to what I was supposed to have gleaned from flipping through all the preceding pages... The tales were readable on their own. If they'd been billed as separate but somewhat related, I might have bought this as a book of stories set in the same world. But they weren't billed as such, they were billed as a novel, and a novel has to have some coherence throughout to succeed as a novel for me...

This may be another of those House of Leaves instances where the point is not so much the story as the art and cleverness of it all. (I didn't get HoL either.) That's fine, and probably resonates with others mightily. It just does not with me...

I stopped reading this book around 45 pages in because I could tell it wasn't for me. I appreciate Simon & Schuster for allowing me to get the chance to read it early, but this was not to my taste.
P.S. I'm giving this a 3 stars because I have to give it some sort of rating, but it doesn't seem fair to give it a 1 or 5 since I didn't finish it.

k



A novel that devotes its third and final section to a transcript of a Desert Island Discs episode showcasing one of its lead character, including all eight musical selections, choice of book and luxury (in this case an inflatable doll) seems likely, at the very least, to garner favour among a section of the British listening public.

But Halliday’s debut will likely resonate rather more widely than BBC Radio 4 listeners. This well written, often funny, but also tender and subtle first work demonstrates significant talent and has been acquired by publishers in some seven countries.

The book’s structure is both unusual and asymmetrical. Its first section, ‘Folly’, sketches the arc of a relationship between an elderly American writer, Ezra Blazer, and a mid-twenties publishing assistant, Mary-Alice, who meet each other on a bench in Central Park, New York. Their involvement – a kind of sentimental education for her, a September love affair for him – is delightful and touching, but serious too. Alice is in search of purpose and aspires to write herself. Ezra, a multiple award-winner (though not, elusively, of the Nobel Prize) is neither well nor strong, yet is writing tirelessly, while observing daily, ‘I don’t know if it’s any good.’ The differences between the pair, of age, experience and attitude, are bridged first by their attraction and his quirky gifts, later by music, sport and a peculiar reliance.

Set against this is an entirely separate-seeming novella entitled ‘Madness’, featuring Amar, an Iraqi-American economist. Part biography, part insight into the political ramifications of the Iraq war, which is the time frame for the Alice/Ezra story, its structure spreads out from Amar’s experience in transit to Kurdistan via Heathrow airport. This tale of politics, family, opportunity and mortality also offers hints at how it may connect to ‘Folly’, although those links are made clearer in that last section focused on Ezra’s radio appearance.

There’s a wide span of material here, geographically, culturally, in terms of age and gender too. But Halliday – who won the 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction – writes in a fresh, unobtrusive manner and seems easily capable of the stretch. Each of her three leading characters emerges with a credible, compelling perspective but most beguiling of her creations, inevitably, is droll, worldly-wise Ezra, reminiscent of Roth and Bellow amongst others, blessed with a tireless fund of jokes and cultural references. His accrued history of creativity, relationships, reading and discovery suggests the ballast that is coming to ground Alice and Amar too.

Peripheral characters are few in this novel. What predominates are context and choice, and the filaments of connection between character and artifice, between living, thinking and writing. This is a strikingly mature and entertaining first work. Lisa Halliday’s first excursion is one to note.

3.5 stars, although my thoughts on this one are a bit asymmetrical.

It’s a book of themes, with asymmetry as the centerpiece. It’s broken into three parts of uneven length, tenuously connected to each other. The first part features an asymmetrical relationship between the narrator, a young woman named Mary Alice, and an aging famous writer. The second part is told from the perspective of an Iraqi American man, flitting back and forth in time and place, but always coming back to his detention in a UK airport. And the third part is very brief and in the form of a radio interview with the famous writer from the first part.

It’s a book of many literary and musical references, with Alice in Wonderland as a clear centre piece. Does Alice fall through the rabbit hole when she meets the famous author in Central Park? Is the middle section Alice’s dream? Is the interview Alice waking up? Perhaps…

It’s well written. It’s tremendously suggestive. It’s a bit creepy. It aims to shock a bit, but not too much. I loved it in parts, but at times I felt a bit too lost and disoriented – much as Alice…

As I write my review, I realize how clever Asymmetry is. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that this was a mixed reading experience. I suspect that some will love it and some will hate it, and others like me will wake up feeling a bit disoriented, trying to figure out what just happened.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy. And thank you to my lovely buddy readers, Angela and Diane -- I was certainly grateful to have both of you reading this one along with me.