To The Last Page

One of the challenges of writing a first novel must be to find something worth writing about, and surely the most important thing to write about is life; taking a view on life that somehow manages to gather everything that is important, wonderful, tragic and bewildering about it, the grand and the small, and squeezing it down into a manageable size in a literary format that tries to make some kind of sense of it all. Well, we’d all like to that to be as easy as it sounds, but we know that it’s something of a tall order. More often, such efforts turn into sprawling epics that try too hard to take in everything, show off a wealth of knowledge and literature and become a literary experiment entangled in a some kind of complex prose or structural technique. Too often instead of being an all-encompassing view of life, such ambitious efforts are myopically reduced to being literary exercises that say more about writing than life. Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry ambitiously sets out to...