Debora Harding (16:45)

Extraordinary, so powerful and like nothing I've read - Kate Mosse

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, but only a footnote to a life of emotional abuse at the hands of a narcissistic mother and deliberately obtuse father.

Paced like a true psychological thriller Debora Harding dexterously shifts between the past and present to unravel her story. From the immediate aftermath of her abduction 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.

This is a harrowing story of reckoning and recovery, deeply reflective, full of compassion, hope, tragedy and real heartbreak, but Harding wears her misfortunes lightly and tells the tale with an unexpected but deft touch of humour.

In association with Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee

In conversation with Allan Little

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