Asymmetry

Alice, a young editor working in New York, meets Ezra Blazer, a famous, much older writer, and they begin an affair. Yet with nearly fifty years between them, what draws them together, and how does it work? In its provocative, playful, and honest and tender depiction of their relationship, Asymmetry illuminates the attractions of knowledge, of intellectual prowess, of self-assurance; also those of youth, of flowering, of naivety and intellectual promise. Interrupting and interacting with their story is that of Amar, an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, whose detention gives him cause to reflect on the course of his life. Asymmetry is an extraordinary study of the power plays between young and old, West and Middle East, luck and talent, fairness and injustice, and the personal and the political. It's also an inventive, utterly contemporary and dazzling debut that will charm, delight and disarm.