Trust chick-lit on this one. By this genre, the sign of irresistible power is to be un-Google-able. To have one’s personal details so well concealed that no search on the Internet could assemble a telling profile.

Living in the new century is for the characters in Jonathan Raban’s brilliant new novel ripe with opportunities to know more. But along with the sense of personal empowerment that comes with easier modes of information gathering is a growing sense of menace that these very tools of empowerment are—or could be—in use against them.

There is at the heart of the book Lucy, a Seattle-based writer, in demand with journals like The New Yorker for her detailed, revealing profiles. Once accused of not possessing a confident point of view—she was like a blotting paper, her mother once said—she absorbs the details of her subject’s life through wide-ranged research and careful fact-checks with acquaintances and surreptitious bugging. “It was what she did best, being a chameleon.”

She is a single mother to 11-year-old Alida, math whiz who harnesses algebraic equations to trace patterns in Lucy’s life. “Her mom could hardly go to the bathroom now without Alida registering the event… with each new addition to the diary she was getting very slightly closer to turning her mom into a soluble equation.”

Completing their pseudo family is Tad, who lives in the building and supplements his income by acting in Department of Homeland Security catastrophe drills, with each detail carefully scrutinised in Washington. Tad carries restrained angst against the rapid loss of privacy, and inhabits the Internet to know what’s happening. “He mostly read foreign media to find out what was happening in his own country… Then he hit the blogs and forums to keep company with like-minded internal exiles—those lonely late-nighters, as full of rage as he was, tapping out their latest intelligence on the administration’s mendacities and misdeeds.”

Holding the story together is Lucy’s new assignment. She has been commissioned to do an in-depth profile of August Vanags, sudden and reportedly reclusive author of a bestselling account of the Holocaust. Vanags, as she discovers early enough, is actually eager for company, given to lengthy monologues on the need to be on guard against America’s enemies. Lucy and then Alida are slowly drawn into the Vanags household. Lucy must also contend with other sources of information and doubts about Vanags’ identity—gained from eager informants and from puzzling passages in other survivors’ Holocaust passages.

And much as Lucy will deny Tad’s theories as paranoia, she too cannot but start at the sight of men in Hawaiian shirts casually showing up on ferries—post-9/11 equivalents of McCarthy’s men in grey suits. But caught as she is in the middle of contending arguments, she wonders, if air marshals are acceptable, what’s wrong with surveillance on the ground.

The end of privacy is a hot subject for current polemics. What makes Surveillance so chilling is its startling disclosures of the little means of surveillance most of us are resorting to in our own lives. It is a portrait of America in its detail but the issues confront almost everybody.