William Cook Haigwood Knihy

Seven stories explore the combustible, violent, funny, tragic and sometimes absurd outcomes that occur when the private experience of one person becomes the unintended and personal possession of another. A woman stalked by a life-saving angel, a city resident with a camera that photographs the unwitting residents of a neighboring highrise, an incautious drug dealer seeking revenge, a widow who discovers she can hear her neighbors’ phone conversations through a baby monitor, a failed father watched relentlessly by a social worker as he parents his children, a wife who must reveal embarrassing secrets to prove she is not responsible for the disappearance of her husband. These are some of the characters that attempt to make meaning from the exposure of the intimate secrets of themselves or others. Set during the last decade of the 20th century, Songs of Surveillance is a wild, suspenseful and poignant accounting of lives inadvertently and vulnerably revealed, and the consequences of their unexpected exposure.