Dancing with the Octopus: The Telling of a True Crime

'Extraordinary, so powerful and like nothing I've read. Astonishing book. It deserves to be the most massive hit.' — Kate Mosse

'I have just finished reading Dancing with the Octopus… You are lucky! The electricity of this true crime memoir awaits you.' — Lemn Sissay (via Twitter)

One Omaha winter day in 1978, when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knife-point, thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom, and left to die.

But what if this wasn't the most traumatic, defining event in her childhood?

Undertaking a radical project, Debora Harding dexterously shifts between the past and present to unravel her story. From the immediate aftermath to the possibility of restorative justice twenty years later, Dancing with the Octopus lays bare the social and political forces that act upon us after the experience of serious crime. A vivid, sly and intimate portrait of one family's disintegration, this is a darkly humorous and ground-breaking narrative of reckoning and recovery.