Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth

‘URGENT AND CAUSTICALLY FUNNY… 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.

Hurper Collins Publishers