Ten top parallel narratives

Lisa Halliday grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction. Asymmetry is her first novel.

One of Halliday's top ten parallel narratives--i.e., novels that track unconnected but related stories, as shared at the Guardian:

NW by Zadie Smith (2012)

The most prominent parallel in this vital, fragmentary novel is between Leah and Keisha, friends who seem at once irreconcilable and two sides of the same coin. The novel winds melancholically among additional binary details and concepts concerning class, identity, and empathy: Keisha renames herself Natalie; over Prosecco, a character says, “It must be comforting being able to divide the world in two like that in your mind … Of course, I’m already divided in half”; and riding a bus, Leah imagines “a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

NW is among Jessica Winter's six favorite books on girl power.

--Marshal Zeringue