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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