' 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.
