--- title: Lisa Halliday's "Asymmetry" Is an Emotional Debut Novel description: Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. canonical: https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/ author: Sarah Begley article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-02-01T11:54:44.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T19:06:15.104Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Lisa Halliday’s ‘Asymmetry’ Is All About a Lopsided Romance og:description: Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. og:url: https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte17736cec00213cd/6988fa27e76ad280db630d80/asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Lisa Halliday’s ‘Asymmetry’ Is All About a Lopsided Romance twitter:description: Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte17736cec00213cd/6988fa27e76ad280db630d80/asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Lisa Halliday’s _Asymmetry_ Is All About A Lopsided Romance > Sponsored content. 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Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Feb 1, 2018 11:54 AM UTC  by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Feb 1, 2018 11:54 AM UTC Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair–a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. This romance is between Alice, a young woman in publishing, and Ezra Blazer, a literary éminence grise, who resembles a certain real-life novelist who is chronically on Nobel wish lists. The details of their relationship are sometimes painfully precise, but Alice’s emotions are mostly left to guesswork. Just as there is something aslant between Alice and Ezra, there is asymmetry between the first half of the book and the second, which focuses on Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American man detained at Heathrow Airport. The shift in subject matter complements one in style: the writing is now explicitly emotional, and so far from the understatement of the first half that you might think it was a different book written by another author. Which is Halliday’s delicious trick. As Ezra says at the end, his “young friend” has written a “veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté.” Alice and Amar may be naive, but Halliday is knowing–about isolation, dissatisfaction and the pain of being human. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/"},"headline":"Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry Is All About A Lopsided Romance","datePublished":"2018-02-01T11:54:44.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T19:06:15.104Z","description":"Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage.","url":"https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/","keywords":["Books"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte17736cec00213cd/6988fa27e76ad280db630d80/asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sarah Begley","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte17736cec00213cd/6988fa27e76ad280db630d80/asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book","caption":"Asymmetry-lisa-halliday-book","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/books/","name":"Books"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5128401/lisa-halliday-asymmetry-book-review/","name":"Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry Is All About A Lopsided Romance"}}]}] ```