Time of the Octopus

A frightening, prophetic vision of our world...

In Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, fugitive US intelligence officer Joshua Kold is held in limbo, unable to leave the airport’s transit area. He is on the run, after blowing the lid off the terrifying reach of covert American global surveillance operations. Will the Russian authorities grant him asylum, or will they hand him over the clutches of the global octopus eager for revenge for his betrayal?

As this gripping psychological and political thriller unfolds, a Moscow lawyer takes Kold to a secret bunker and grills him intently on just why he did it. Upon Kold’s answers hang not only his own fate, but much, much more as the true extent of this chilling 1984 world unfolds.

Anatoly Kucherena is the famous Russian lawyer who took on the case of the American whistleblower Edward Snowden whose revelations about US intelligence operations sent shockwaves around the world in 2013. Time of the Octopus is a fiction, but it is based on Kucherena’s own interviews with Snowden at Sheremetyevo, and provides the basis for Oliver Stone’s major Hollywood movie ‘Snowden’ starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the movie events of 2016.

According to Stone, "Anatoly has written a 'grand inquisitor'-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistleblower against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions. His meditations on the meaning of totalitarian power in the 21st century make for a chilling, prescient horror story.”

Is Kold simply a traitor, or the courageous hero of a terrifying struggle against the dark forces of oppression?

Translated by John Farndon with Akbota Sultanbekova and Olga Nakston.