Summary

The second section of Halliday’s novel opens with an Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American practical economist who has just finished graduate school in Los Angeles, being detained in Heathrow Airport on his way from Los Angeles to visit his brother in Kurdistan in 2008, five years after America’s invasion of Iraq. A customs agent asked Amar a series of questions about his travels. Amar told the agent that he was going to stay in London for a couple of days to see friends and would be staying with his friend Alastair Blunt, a foreign correspondent.

The novel then shifts into Amar’s reflection on his childhood – both of his parents were born in Baghdad, as was his older brother Sami, but Amar was born on the airplane that was taking his family to the United States, where his father was going to work...