Quote:
Originally Posted by brianr
This was an excellent book, thank you for the recommendation. Amazing for a first- time novel.
Glad you liked it! The Tommy Orange novel is also an amazing debut.
Another terrific debut I read this past year was Lisa Halladay's
Asymmetry. Two novellas, apparently unrelated, other than each having the theme of asymmetry (in personal relations in the first case; in international relations in the second), with a wonderful epilogue that brings the two together …
The first part is based on the author’s affair, as a young woman, with Philip Roth, who, in a subsequent interview, responded good-humouredly by saying, "She got me"!
By coincidence just before reading
Asymmetry I read Ann Patchett's 2016
Commonwealth, which is also very strong. What makes the two so interesting together is that both are (at least in part) about a young woman having an affair with an author who is a much older man. If either had been written by a male author in this metoo moment of time they would have been attacked as portraying a inappropriate power imbalance in a sexual relationship -- but because they were written by women neither was criticized.