Spook Country by William Gibson is out August 7. It's sure to be among the summer's most memorable books.

Gibson is the author of eight previous novels, including Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer, all of which demonstrate his amazing ability to capture the world's spoken and unspoken jitters. And he always seems a generation or two beyond the rest of us when it comes to technology's possibilities and pitfalls.

All of that is on display in Spook Country, a thriller in distinctly Gibsonian terms: a new, virtual art form called Locative Art, sensitive political information, and a cargo container that holds...something of interest, to put it mildly. As always with Gibson, an exciting and thought-provoking read.