Nathaniel Rich with Kyle Chayka: Cloudthief

What happens when society’s most valuable treasure is no longer stored in banks, casinos, and museums — but in colossal data centers?

Award-winning novelist and journalist Nathaniel Rich, author of Second Nature and King Zeno, offers a brilliant philosophical twist on the classic heist thriller in Cloudthief — “a sneaky, clever 21st century heist novel that’s a propulsive page turner … extremely satisfying and very funny” (Jeff VanderMeer) — and a conversation with New Yorker tech columnist Kyle Chayka.

In endless rows of hard drives, the sum of our civilization’s knowledge, all of the world’s personal and private truths — uploaded, saved, and unguarded. Cloudthief follows a climate journalist disillusioned with chronicling the end of the world and an evasive, paranoid, technologically savvy con artist living off the grid in the heart of Manhattan. Together, they hatch a plan to steal the secrets hidden in the depths of the world’s largest data center on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma. But each has secrets of their own — secrets that could destroy them both.

Move over, Ocean’s Eleven — the great heist story of the digital age is here. Informed by a career of brilliant reporting on climate and technology in The New York Times Magazine, driven by the restless invention that has made his fiction a hit with critics and readers alike, Nathaniel Rich delivers a masterwork for the technological age. Hear him and Chayka in a conversation about imagination, surveillance, theft, and the future of knowledge.

“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