A criminal career has to begin somewhere, and this one begins at a Manhattan storage facility. It shapes up, at best, as an entry-level heist, breaking into a barely protected storage unit to pilfer Upper West Siders' forgotten belongings. But our burgeoning criminal encounters something more unexpected than a dusty treasure trove: a resident, Virginia, a young woman who has found a way to live off the grid in the heart of Manhattan.
Virginia, unsurprisingly, has an idiosyncratic sense of how the world works-and a deeply analytic mind and skillset that make it clear just how small potatoes the storage unit heist is. Soon the two of them are a criminal duo with their eyes set on the most lucrative target the twenty-first century has to offer: data. The bank heist or the museum robbery is a thing of the past, and with purely digital theft and fraud, it's too hard to get away clean. The overlooked targets are the giant, anonymous data centers with hard drives full of all the information that make the world go round. Here, the data is physical, and no one is paying that much attention.
Or so they convince themselves.
Hitting every beat of the classic heist story but brilliantly updated for our times, Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief escalates from a low-rent hustle through the slightly more glamorous data heist to one final grand, seemingly noble, high-stakes scheme that, of course, promises to change everything. And does, if not in the way anyone planned for.
About the Author :
Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History (MCD, 2019), a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Award and a winner of awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physics. He is also the author of the novels King Zeno (MCD, 2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013); and The Mayor's Tongue (2008). Rich's short fiction has been published by McSweeney's, Esquire, Vice, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The American Scholar; he was awarded the 2017 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction and is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Review :
"A boisterous new novel that's equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness . . . [Cloudthief serves] up the juicy stuff that we all love in a heist story . . . A blast . . . Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I've read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation." --John Powers, Fresh Air
"[A] rambunctious, thoroughly entertaining heist novel . . . Rich has an ear for dialogue, for the sound of smart people doing stupid shit." --Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
"Is any younger writer so versatile, talented and original as Nathaniel Rich? . . . Cloudthief is propulsive, precise and alive, the rare book that could instantly be made into a film though rich in knowledge, ideas and questions--and that gives me hope for literature." --Pico Iyer (via X)
"A rollicking good time . . . [A] spry, funny caper." --Colin Dwyer, NPR
"I was all in on page 5, when I read this tossed-off line of description: On the bus we passed a file of identical A-frame houses that formed a long scream: AAAAAAAAAAAAA. A page-turner built from prose like that, mamma mia." --Molly Young (via Substack)
"Cloudthief is a novel scheming in the modern age . . . What's so striking about Cloudthief [. . .] is how little Rich leans on his considerable skill as a thriller writer . . . Brilliant and harrowing . . . The story soars through questions about who we are, what can be known about us, and what, in the end, we can know about each other." --Ron Charles (via Substack)
"A smart and entertaining heist story . . . Whether in love or theft, information is the valuable currency in this novel. And it is something, we are reminded, that can be smuggled away in a backpack." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A gripping road trip heist story filled with edgy dialogue and thought-provoking social commentary on the working class's growing fury over high-tech's chokehold on modern life." --Suzanne Van Atten, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Structured initially as a heist and then progressing into something more complex, Rich cleverly weaves the pressing issues of our time into a gripping, all-encompassing narrative." --Bloomberg
"A heady and diabolical mix of atmospheric road trip, mad caper, and risky love story spiked with shrewd insights . . . Rich has ingeniously crafted a seductive bull's-eye thriller of psychological exactitude and scathing societal critique." --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"[A] meticulously plotted, philosophically compelling caper . . . Engrossing . . . Genuine intellectual heft and fast-paced, nimbly plotted action can coexist, after all. Top-notch."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rich's heist novel is doing what the best genre fiction does: using genre mechanics--suspense, the caper, the twist--to make a structural argument about what the economy has become." --Tech Times
"A definite page-turner, this novel asks us to take a look at ourselves and the world we've created, where privacy is gone and nothing is secure." --Nautilus
"Equal parts modern relationship drama, philosophical inquiry and comic heist thriller, it's thought-provoking realism at the intersection of technology and malaise--a caper for Cory Doctorow devotees." --Zoomer
"Nathaniel Rich has constructed a category of fiction inescapably classifiable as noir reportage. Cloudthief is a must-read novel for anyone disturbed about the dubious direction of the 21st century."
--Barry Gifford, author of Sailor & Lula and The Exception
"Cloudthief is a literary tour de force that takes us deep inside the immensely powerful systems that have become the secret architecture of our lives. It is at once a gripping narrative of crime and consequence, and a devastating critique of our surveillance-obsessed world. This novel confirms Nathaniel Rich as one of our most essential and prophetic voices."
--Amitav Ghosh, author of Ghost-Eye
"Cloudthief is a sneaky, clever 21st century heist novel that's a propulsive page turner, but also contains multitudes in the ways it interrogates our modern condition. Extremely satisfying and very funny."
--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach series
