"Cloudthief"

Coming July 14 from MCD: Cloudthief: A Novel by Nathaniel Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

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?

Visit Nathaniel Rich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lightning Beneath the Sea"

New from W.W. Norton: Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age by James M. Tabor.

About the book, from the publisher:

The thrilling story of the nineteenth century’s Apollo moonshot: an Atlantic-spanning telegraph cable that created the global village and changed the world.

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. In 1866, after enduring over a decade of global scorn, catastrophic failures, staggering losses, and brushes with death, he would finally lay his great cable, ushering in the global information age. From acclaimed author James M. Tabor, Lightning Beneath the Sea is an unforgettable tale of radical vision, unwavering determination, and triumph against overwhelming odds that transformed life on Earth forever.

In a propulsive narrative, Tabor tells how Field swiftly assembled an all-star scientific dream team that included telegraph legend Samuel F. B. Morse; a young Lord Kelvin, called the da Vinci of his day; Michael Faraday, the father of electrical engineering; and legendary philanthropist Peter Cooper. Together they battled epic storms, freak accidents, corporate sabotage, the enmity of Abraham Lincoln, and the hubris of the project’s original chief electrician―an eccentric who insisted on being called Wildman―while racing two rival efforts to establish telegraphic communications between continents. When it was finally done, Field’s cable lay up to 2.5 miles deep under the ocean, and the London Daily News announced: “Time and space seem literally annihilated.” The cable’s legacy can be traced today in the hundreds of descendants that still carry 98 percent of the world’s information through a “world undersea web.”

Deeply researched and written with verve, Lightning Beneath the Sea is the gripping account of an epochal achievement.

Visit James M. Tabor's website.

Writers Read: James M. Tabor.

My Book, The Movie: Frozen Solid.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sisters of a Halved Heart"

New from Algonquin Books: Sisters of a Halved Heart: A Novel by Nayantara Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

The electric story of two sisters and an unthinkable betrayal.

Mira Guhathakurta is a poetry editor at a distinguished literary magazine in New York, a dream job that has given her nearly everything she's always wanted. And then she reconnects with Jack from college—kind, funny, intelligent Jack—and suddenly Mira feels as if she might have found her soulmate. They've woven their lives together so thoroughly; all that remains is for Jack to meet her family: her beloved father and dear sister Joy. But when Joy commits an unthinkable act of betrayal, the sisters are impossibly fractured and their father's heart is broken. As the sisters navigate their tumultuous relationship and Mira starts over, it turns out that Joy isn't the only one who has been—or continues to be—dishonest.

In a propulsive story of love and passion and the ultimate pull of family, Sisters of a Halved Heart examines the lengths we will go to in order to make our own narratives of love work out, the lies we tell ourselves, and the ways in which the truth, often right in front of you, can be impossible to see.

Visit Nayantara Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Settling Debt"

New from Cornell University Press: Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis by Cameron Seglias.

About the book, from the publisher:

Settling Debt overturns the familiar tale of early antislavery as a pure moral triumph by revealing its uneasy ties to colonial ambition and economic anxiety. Cameron Seglias shows how, from the late seventeenth century through the American Revolution, settlers and religious writers condemned slavery as a threat to their own prosperity and salvation. Debt, understood both as money owed and moral obligation, anchored their vision of freedom and shaped how they justified seizing Indigenous lands while denouncing racial bondage.

Drawing from neglected books, pamphlets, poems, and dramatic protests, like the radical acts of Benjamin Lay, Seglias weaves literary close readings with sharp historical insights to expose how freedom and dispossession were two sides of the same coin. At once readable and provocative, Settling Debt compels us to see how the language of moral debt masked the building of a colonial order rooted in inequality. In revisiting this past, Seglias offers a timely reminder: The debts of America's founding have yet to be settled.

--Marshal Zeringue