A book embedding of a graph is a drawing that maps vertices onto a line and edges to simple pairwise non-crossing curves drawn into pages, which are half-planes bounded by that line. Two-page book embeddings, i.e., book embeddings into 2 pages, are of special importance as they are both NP-hard to compute and have specific applications. We obtain a 2^(O(\sqrt{n})) algorithm for computing a book embedding of an n-vertex graph on two pages -- a result which is asymptotically tight under the Exponential Time Hypothesis. As a key tool in our approach, we obtain a single-exponential fixed-parameter algorithm for the same problem when parameterized by the treewidth of the input graph. We conclude by establishing the fixed-parameter tractability of computing minimum-page book embeddings when parameterized by the feedback edge number, settling an open question arising from previous work on the problem.

An extended abstract of this paper has been accepted at ICALP 2024