Airport Love Theme is a graphic novel set on two airplanes and in detention at Los Angeles LAX airport, recalling the absurd exchanges – about love and sex, celebrity, food and family – that once took place between US border security officers, an artist held and interrogated under suspicion while travelling to an art fair, and fellow passenger-detainees.

Farah’s debut book explores the promise of mobility offered by the international art world, and how that promise can fail outrageously. Suspense and disorientation play out in subtle ways, encouraging self-questioning on the part of readers given joint responsibility for making sense of troubling events. The novel’s structure is linear, but also echoes the tendency of traumatic experience to produce indelible scenes that repeat and return.