Surveillance: A Novel by Jonathan RabanFrom Booklist
In this well-imagined tale of terrorist-obsessed America in the very near future, the government keeps citizens in a perpetual state of frenzied fear by staging ever-more elaborate drills featuring professional actors portraying victims of some imagined attack. Cultures clash, and private citizens are as prone to snooping as their government. Lucy Bengstrom, journalist, occasional stutterer, and single mom, succeeds in landing an interview with a famously reclusive author. Despite his hospitality and offer to teach Bengstrom's daughter to kayak, Bengstrom finds the subject of her magazine profile a flawed, unappealing character with repressive political views. Through the Internet, she links to a rural Englishwoman, who offers evidence that this author's best-selling memoir of the war and the Holocaust may be fake. Bengstrom also must fend off advances from her ambitious, immigrant landlord, whose own secrets may be uncovered by a disgruntled tenant. Raban's characters, not the futurist setting, are the real focus of this engrossing novel. Mark Knoblauch
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other books by this author:
Arabia, 1979
Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi, 1981
Coasting: A Private Voyage, 1987
Foreign Land, 1988
God, Man and Mrs. Thatcher, 1989
For Love and Money: A Writing Life, 1969-1989, 1990
Soft City, 1991
Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America, 1991
The Oxford Book of the Sea, 1992
Bad Land: An American Romance, 1996
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, 1999
Waxwings, 2003
odd site:
Connecting the Dots - Tracking Two Identified Terrorists, by Valdis Krebs www.orgnet.com/prevent.html
