Surveillance

by JonathanRaban (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $3.31

  Lucy Bengstrom had always dreamed of living in Seattle. From her remote childhood home, it seemed an Oz - a city of possibilities and fantastic, distant pleasures. But now, in 2005, living alone with her eleven year old daughter Alida, things seem less clear-cut. Post 9/11, the promise of homeland security and the implication of severe vulnerability are closely bound together. When Lucy is asked to write about August Vanagas, a reclusive international bestselling author, Lucy becomes intrigued by his story. His memoir of his childhood as an orphaned boy adrift in Europe during the Second World War seems to reveal the most painful of truths - but the more she learns, the more questions she has . . .

  To Alida's generation - plugged into iPods, used to having their lives watched and documented - the virtual world is as important (if not more so) than the real one. She and her schoolfriends defer to The Geek, giving him muffins and doughnuts in exchange for his knowledge of writing computer codes that promise make their websites ever cooler. Struggling to interpret her world, Alida gathers information about her family and friends in the hope she can develop a human algebra which will help make sense of the way people are.

  Tad lives in the same apartment block as Lucy and Alida. He's an out-of-work actor and an activist, driven to earn money by taking part in government sponsored mock terrorist attacks staged in the city. Disenchanted by the US administration and all it stands for, he spends sleepless nights surfing the internet, tracking news stories around the world, trying to pin down a nugget of truth in a vast sea of propaganda.

  Who can you trust when the lines between fact and fiction become so blurred?

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.31

  In a brave new post-9/11 world jumpy Seattle bears little resemblance to the city Lucy Bengstrom dreamed of as a girl. Living alone with her eleven-year-old daughter Alida, she looks to her journalism to make sense of it all.

  Yet with Alida drifting into adolescence and the home she's built up for them under threat, it's clear to Lucy that life is changing. Finding herself under intense scrutiny and faced with her toughest assignment yet, she begins to rebel against everything her personal and professional life has taught her.

  `Chastening and darkly funny . . . For all its gloomy prognostications on the way society is heading, Surveillance will only leave you wanting more' Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph

  'Surveillance is a work that confirms Raban as one of the most original commentators on the times in which we live' William Skidelsky, New Statesman

  `A dense human comedy about truth and lies . . . He writes easily, his prose is relaxed, conversational, his observations shrewd . . . Surveillance is a novel for and about a US in which everyone wants to be American and in which security is the new terror. Raban's offbeat narrative is a cautionary one dealing with the upheaval of the crisis known as Now' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times