Surveillance

Starred review from November 13, 2006
Raban (Waxwings
) explores the current political climate in this clever, unsettling novel set in a near-future Seattle. Freelance journalist Lucy Bengstrom has been hired by GQ
magazine to write a profile of August Vanags, the bestselling author of Boy 381
, an account of his childhood as an orphan making his way through the charred landscape of WWII Europe. As Lucy researches Vanags's life, she begins to suspect he has falsified the entire account. When she receives a picture that purports to show the author as a child safely ensconced on an English chicken farm during the war years, she's almost sure he's a fake. Almost. Meanwhile, Lucy's daughter, Alida, struggles with being raised by a single mom; the gay man next door may or may not be dying of AIDS; Vanags's wife is in the early stages of Alzheimer's; and a grim U.S. government escalates its police-state techniques to defend against the terrorism threat. 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. 7-city author tour.

December 1, 2006
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)