Asymmetry at Harvard Book Store

Despite its title, Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry equalizes two seemingly unrelated stories through a third that explains the association. Her debut novel, divided into three distinct parts, starts with the story of a young aspiring writer’s affair with a literary icon. The action then moves to a Muslim man detained at Heathrow Airport while en route to Iraq, and eventually these stories overlap in the novel’s final act. While Halliday toys with the constructs of gender, age and ethnicity, she lures the reader into questioning other inequalities in our society as well. / Brynne Crawley