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Cloudthief

A Novel

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Pub Date Jul 14 2026 | Archive Date Aug 14 2026


Description

Why settle for nothing, when you can steal everything?

Forget banks, casinos, museums—society’s most valuable treasure sits in the giant, anonymous data centers that power modern life. There, in endless rows of hard drives, lies the sum of our civilization’s knowledge, all of the world’s personal and private truths, uploaded and saved. They wait unseen, unexploited, and, most critically, unguarded.

Tim is a climate journalist disillusioned with chronicling the end of the world. Virginia is an evasive, paranoid, and technologically savvy con artist who has found an ingenious way to live off the grid in the heart of Manhattan. Joined by desire and desperation, they hatch a plan to steal secrets. But they have secrets of their own—secrets they can’t tell each other, secrets that could destroy them both...

With their last few dollars and some dimestore wigs they set out for the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the unlikely site of the world’s largest repository of knowledge—a data center the size of a small city—to attempt a brazen heist that, whether they fail or succeed, will change their lives forever.

But the heist is only the beginning.

From the award-winning author Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief is a heist novel for a new era, in which the most valuable things in life are virtual, privacy is a sick joke, and security is relative. After all is lost, what remains?

Why settle for nothing, when you can steal everything?

Forget banks, casinos, museums—society’s most valuable treasure sits in the giant, anonymous data centers that power modern life. There, in...


A Note From the Publisher

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.

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...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780374619794
PRICE $28.00 (USD)
PAGES 304

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