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In the not-too-distant future, national identity cards are mandatory, and America has become obsessed with intelligence-gathering. The government’s scrutiny is omnipresent, civilians freely indulge their curiosity on the Internet, journalists pursue their investigations with relentless determination, and children both snoop on their parents and manipulate new technologies.
In Seattle, the unfulfilled actor Tad Zachary now performs mostly in the Department of Homeland Security’s fictional disaster scenarios, while his friend and neighbor Lucy Bengstrom struggles to support her eleven-year-old daughter, Alida, on a freelance journalist’s meager income–with their landlord providing additional threats. Then Lucy is assigned to write a profile of August Vanags, a retired professor turned best-selling author with his memoir of a childhood ravaged by World War II, but the validity of his account grows questionable, even as Lucy and Alida are charmed by both Vanags and his lonesome wife.
Starred Review."An air of suspenseful dread hangs over every page of this intelligent, provocative book, and when the end finally rolls in, readers will be stunned and, in some cases, outraged." - PW.
"In this well-imagined tale....Raban's characters, not the futurist setting, are the real focus of this engrossing novel." - Booklist.
“When the going gets tough, the tough get nosy. And so, in this well-realized novel, does everyone else . . . A coolly delivered portrait of the Wired Age, when paranoia rules and truth is at a premium.” - Kirkus.
“Surveillance is arguably the finest, most human, most chilling novel to have emerged in response to these desperate times.” – Literary Review.
This information about Surveillance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Raban is also the author of Waxwings and Passage to Juneau.
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