Homeland
by Cory Doctorow

Just a few years after Little Brother, Marcus’s problems are back: California’s economy has collapsed, taking his parents and his university tuition with it. M1k3y’s political past saves him and lands him a job as webmaster for a muckraking politician who promises reform. 

Things are rarely this simple—as Marcus discovers when his onetime girlfriend Masha resurfaces. She has emerged from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump, full of hard evidence of conscious corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world.

If Marcus personally leaks it, he’ll cost his employers the election, though he’s surrounded by friends and acquaintances who regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. Nobody—his current girlfriend, his weary parents, his progressive-minded employer, his hacker admirers—knows just how unsure of himself he really is.

Meanwhile, hard people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’ve got plenty of experience inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Inflicting it on Marcus…or, worse, on people he loves.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.