Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday's first novel sets two seemingly unrelated stories side by side. In the first section, Folly, Alice, a young American editor in New York, begins an affair with Ezra Blazer, a famous and much older writer, in the early years of the war in Iraq. In the second, Madness, Amar, an Iraqi-American man, is held by immigration officers at Heathrow in 2008 and recalls his life in America. The two perspectives start to interact and overlap, and a coda follows. The novel examines imbalances of age, power, talent, wealth, fame and justice in human relationships. Halliday had won a 2017 Whiting Award, and The New York Times named the book among 15 remarkable works by women shaping 21st-century fiction.

Barack Obama picked it for his best books of 2018 list on Facebook.