Harding Debora: Dancing with the Octopus

"Extraordinary" Kate Moss

"electric' lam Sissy

'burning' Julia Samuel

Omaha One winter day in 1978, when Deborah Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knifepoint, shoved into a car and taken away, beaten, demanded a ransom, and left for dead.

But what if it wasn't the most traumatic, defining event of her childhood?

Undertaking a radical project, Deborah Harding deftly moves between the past and the present to unravel her story. Starting with the immediate consequences and ending with the possibility of restorative justice twenty years later, Dancing with an Octopus exposes the social and political forces that act on us after committing a serious crime. A vivid, cunning and intimate portrait of the disintegration of one family, this is a darkly humorous and innovative narrative of reckoning and recovery.