'Stand by for fireworks as it hits the shelves' SUNDAY TIMES'If Orwell were with us today, he'd be writing books like this' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
'Stand by for fireworks as it hits the shelves' SUNDAY TIMES
'If Orwell were with us today, he'd be writing books like this' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
'Breath-taking and jaw-dropping' PETER FRANKOPAN
'A true-life thriller' ANNE APPLEBAUM
From the bestselling author of Kleptopia comes a true story about Cuckooland – a world where the rich can buy everything – including the truth.
Everywhere, the powerful are making a renewed claim to the greatest prize of all: to own the truth. The power to choose what you want reality to be and impose that reality on the world.
For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland – the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked town square in Uzbekistan to a royal retreat in Scotland. Burgis hunted down oligarchs, developed secret sources and traced vast sums of money flowing between multinational corporations, ex-Soviet dictators and the west’s ruling elites. And he found one man who wanted the power to bend reality to his will.
This book tells an astonishing story: a tale of secrets and lies that reveals how fragile that truth can be. Whether it’s in Kazakh torture chambers or the UK’s High Court, the lords of Cuckooland are seizing control of the truth. They decree what stories may be told about war and money and power, what we are permitted to know – and more importantly, what we are not.
From the bestselling author of Kleptopia, Cuckooland is a deeply reported work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller. It is a story of how globalisation and technological revolution have combined to imperil the foundation of free societies: that the truth belongs to the many, not the few.
‘No one has written a book like Cuckooland. Serious… but it is also at times very funny'
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Savagely funny… Amersi’s obscenity-laden threats against Burgis sparkle through the buoyant prose of Cuckooland. Burgis has somehow managed to make this meticulously researched, sordid tale entertaining. Written as a pacy thriller that communicates the deluded, self-important tone of its subjects, he renders Amersi as both menacing and ridiculous: preening, thin-skinned, panicky'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'The world Burgis reveals is a complex and murky one. To write about this world is to be watched, is to be researched, to be threatened by shockingly expensive lawyers'
GUARDIAN
‘Burgis is one of our finest investigative journalists, a muck-raker who can also turn a caustic phrase… Taken together, his books are chapters in a sustained, convincing story about the ways extreme wealth reshapes the nation'
NEW STATESMAN
'An amazing book… a very beautifully written account of how money works within that [Tory] party'
RORY STEWART, THE REST IS POLITICS
‘Written as a true-life thriller, Cuckooland reveals a secret world of access and influence, where inconvenient facts can be white-washed if you have the right connections and resources… A vital book for this election year’
ANNE APPLEBAUM
‘I read it in one sitting – and couldn’t put it down. Astonishing’
PETER FRANKOPAN
'Cuckooland exposes one of the very gravest dangers of our era: the way the rich and powerful try to suppress the truth and rewrite objective reality. In this lively, scathing account… fearless'
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
Tom Burgis won a fellowship at the Financial Times in 2006, and has worked on the paper ever since. He has reported from London, Brussels, South America and Africa, writing on the privation and conflict that accompanies the resource trade.His work has appeared in the Telegraph, the Independent, the Observer, the New Statesman, the Big Issue and Open Democracy, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for ‘Young Journalist of the Year’ at the British Press Awards.
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