The Nature of Things

Let me just get this out of the way right up front: I loved this book! I thought it was brilliantly written, the characters were engaging, and the pace of the plot kept me turning the pages and made it hard to put the book down and sorry to see it end. Hard to believe that this was actually Lisa Halliday's debut novel, although she has been an award-winning writer of other fiction. The book, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. The first part follows 20-something Alice, an assistant editor at a publishing house in New York, and her developing relationship with Ezra, a much older and much-honored writer. The second part deals with Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, detained on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan and stuck in a holding room in Heathrow Airport in London. And the final part features Ezra doing a radio interview with a public radio type. We follow Alice as she sits on a park bench one day and is joined by a man who is perhaps in his sixties - old enough to be ...