It begins with an ice cream cone on a bench in Central Park. Head over heels, Alice plunges into a love story with the famous writer Ezra Blazer. She is 25, he is in his seventies. An erotic, tragicomic chamber play - but then a completely different narrative takes over. Amar, an American-Iraqi doctoral student on his way to the Middle East, is detained at London Airport and finds himself in the vacuum of waiting rooms and endless interrogations. Lisa Halliday subtly weaves these two disparate stories into a bold, provocative novel. She writes about the power dynamics that run through our world, between young and old, happiness and talent, the personal and the political.