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Nathaniel Rich

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Cloudthief and three previous novels, all New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selections, including the New Orleans-set King Zeno. His nonfiction includes Second Nature—the basis for the film Dark Waters—and Losing Earth, currently being adapted for film by Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy. Rich is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, frequently contributes to Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, and teaches at Tulane University.

 

Schedule

11:00 am to Noon
State Library, Third Floor
Wrapped in a Mystery: Heists, Capers, and Hidden Lives
Jess Armstrong, The Lost Souls of Saint Oda's: A Ruby Vaughn Mystery
Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief: A Novel
Katy Simpson Smith, The Maltese Version: A Novel
with moderator Olivia Clare Friedman

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Cloudthief: A Novel

One of the Los Angeles Times's 12 Best Books of Summer
A Chicago Tribune "Coolest Book of Summer"

"A blast . . . Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I've read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation." ―John Powers, Fresh Air

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?