Surveillance

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In a near-future America, national identity cards are mandatory, and the government is fixated on intelligence-gathering. Surveillance is pervasive, with civilians indulging their curiosity online, journalists pursuing stories with tenacity, and children both spying on their parents and mastering new technologies. In Seattle, unfulfilled actor Tad Zachary primarily performs in fictional disaster scenarios for the Department of Homeland Security, while his neighbor, freelance journalist Lucy Bengstrom, struggles to support her eleven-year-old daughter, Alida, amid financial pressures and threats from their landlord. Lucy's assignment to profile August Vanags, a retired professor and best-selling author recounting his war-torn childhood, raises questions about the authenticity of his memoir, even as Lucy and Alida find themselves charmed by him and his lonely wife. In this world, everyone is either under surveillance or spying on others, blurring the lines between truth and fiction in a climate of personal stress and societal panic, where the specters of terrorist attacks and literary deceit loom large. With precision and compassion, the narrative explores a complex period in history, revealing a diverse array of lives entangled in the societal fault lines of the time.