The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History

Once Upon a Time in Russia

A gripping and shocking insight into Russia's most influential oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, from New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House.

Assassination plots, intimidation tactics, political manoeuvring and money in unfeasibly large quantities – this is the stuff of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia, a nonfiction journey into the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of the oligarchs . . . one of our favourites.

Ben Mezrich is the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House in addition to many other books, both fiction and non-fiction. The major motion picture 21, starring Kevin Spacey, was based on Bringing Down the House. The Oscar-winning film The Social Network was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires. Mezrich lives in Boston with his wife and son.

A gripping and shocking insight into Russia's most influential oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, from New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires. 
 
To understand the state of Russia today, one must understand the oligarchs who have shaped it. 
 
Once Upon a Time in Russia is the true and untold story of the larger-than-life oligarchs who reaped the riches of privatisation after the fall of the Soviet regime: "Godfather of the Kremlin" Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician whose first entrepreneurial venture was running an automobile reselling business, and Roman Abramovich, his dashing young protégé who built a multi-billion-dollar empire of oil and aluminium. Locked in a complex, uniquely Russian partnership, the two battled their way through the "Wild East" of Russia, with Berezovsky acting as the younger man's krysha - his roof, his protector. 
 
Written with the heart-stopping pace of a thriller, this true story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky's krysha, Abramovich built one of Russia's largest oil companies from the ground up in exchange for cash deliveries - including 491 million dollars in just one year. But their relationship frayed when Berezovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin in the media. As Berezovsky fled to the UK, Abramovich continued to prosper. 
 
Dead bodies trailed Berezovsky's footsteps, and threats followed him to London, where an associate of his died painfully and famously of Polonium poisoning. Then, Berezovsky himself was later dead, officially declared a suicide. 
 
Exclusively sourced, capturing a momentous period in recent world history, Once Upon a Time in Russia is at once personal and political, offering an unprecedented look into the wealth, corruption, and power behind what Graydon Carter dubbed 'the story of our age'.

Seven Wonders

An electrifying thriller, perfect for fans of The Da Vinci Code.

Seven Wonders is the type of thriller that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and takes no prisoners. Ben Mezrich is an author whose skill for weaving imaginative and often insane adventures kept me riveted to the very last page … A cracking read!

It’s a fast-moving thriller involving murder, conspiracy, historical mystery, and the Seven Wonders of the World. Is it enjoyable and imaginative? Hell, yeah.

A fast-moving thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Whilst exploring the ruins of a Greek temple, Professor Jack Grady receives an urgent phone call: his brother, a renowned mathematician, has been murdered. 
 
His sudden death, that comes just as he was about to crack the code of a centuries-old mystery, sets in motion a global domino effect. 
 
Jack must race from Brazil and Jordan to India and Peru in order to discover the secret that links the Seven Wonders of the World, before it’s too late…

Straight Flush

The New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House returns with the larger-than-life true tale of a group of hard-partying frat brothers who built a multi-billion-dollar on-line poker colossus – and what happened when the Feds shut down their operation, sending them on the run.

Mezrich writes some of the most exciting non-fiction books I've ever read ... This is a fascinating tale ... Mezrich's huge strength as an author is that he manages to bring characters to life so quickly. Within a few chapters, everyone who he's writing about has been vividly described and I was desperate to find out what happened to each of them

Peppered with fast cars, cocktails, parties and beautiful women, this is an exhilarating ride.

Ben Mezrich’s Straight Flush reads like a thriller and it rattles along at breakneck speed … It’s a well written book about an internet start up and how it all went wrong.

Entertaining ... Hollywood’s going to eat this up.

Straight Flush is the true story of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local bar into one of the largest online poker companies in the world. 
 
At its height, the group's online empire was bringing in revenues of over a million dollars a day. The industry they launched grew so huge so fast, and in such a grey area of US and international law, at first it was never really clear whether their actions were legal or criminal. 
 
From setting up their operations in Costa Rica, to their efforts at building a veil of legitimacy in Vancouver; from embracing a hedonistic lifestyle of girls, drugs and money to becoming some of the richest people in the world; from engaging in operations against their competitors that sometimes escalated into near all-out wars to the legal battles that finally resulted in one of them heading to prison and another living life on the run – Straight Flush is an exclusive look behind the headlines of one of the biggest stories of the past decade.

Sex on the Moon

Ocean's Eleven meets A Beautiful Mind...Sex on The Moon is the amazing true story of the 25-year-old genius who pulled off one of the most unique and significant heists in US history

The story that follows is everything you'd expect from Mezrich.  Written almost entirely from Roberts' point of view, it delivers clever people doing clever things, betrayals and ingenious schemes and the sort of narrative arc that urges you to consume it all in one sitting...it is grippingly written...

Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA programme had an idea - a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally. 
 
Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impenetrable laboratory at NASA's headquarters - past security checkpoints, and electronically locked door with cipher security codes and camera-lined hallways - and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: Apollo moon rocks from every moon landing in history. 
 
Was Thad Roberts - undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable - really what he seemed? 
 
And what does one do with an item so valuable that it's illegal even to own? 
 
Based on meticulous research into thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts and documents, and scores of interviews with the people involved, Mezrich - with his signature high-velocity swagger - has reconstructed the madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity all centred on a heist that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.

How Six Students Took Vegas for Millions

21: Bringing Down the House

Now a major motion picture starring and directed by Kevin Spacey 
 
The film tie-in edition for this gripping real-life thriller, an international bestseller, which tells the story of a brilliant team of MIT students who won millions at Las Vegas. Ocean's Eleven, but for real.

[A] high-octane tale with rich, sharp dialogue, bordering on Elmore Leonard turf...Bringing Down the House is a can't-miss deal.

A surreal cacophony of glamour, suspense and, eventually, terror. Part Tom Clancy, part Elmore Leonard...Gripping

The tale laid out in Bringing Down the House is so beguiling, so agreeably reminiscent of, say Ocean's Eleven or House of Games that you find yourself mentally casting the parts as you read along... A fine yarn.

An extraordinary story- [I read] this thrilling book in almost one sitting - it is, to use that cliche, "unputdownable"- a book that will surely become a classic of its genre.

Real-life all too rarely offers stories that are quite as satisfying as fiction. Bringing Down the House is one of the exceptions. Cheating in casinos is illegal; card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. But casinos understandably dislike the practice and make every effort to keep card-counters out of their premises. 
 
Bringing Down the House tells the true story of the most successful scam ever, in which teams of brilliant young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos of Las Vegas, being drawn in the process into the high-life of drugs, high-spending and sex. Bringing Down the House is as readable and as fascinating as Liar's Poker or Barbarians At the Gate, an insight into a closed, excessive and utterly corrupt world.

Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook

The Accidental Billionaires

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, this is the fast-paced story of two Ivy-League outcasts who concocted a scheme to meet girls, and ended up inventing Facebook

PURE SUMMER FUN... JUICY, FAST-PACED, UNPUTDOWNABLE... Ben has a gift for finding high-energy, strange-but-true tales and [SOCIAL NETWORK] is no exception... a captivating story of betrayal, vast amounts of cash, and two friends who revolutionized the way humans connect to one another.

Even if you've never logged on to Facebook, the premise behind this true story is irresistible... A 21st century fable, it unfolds with all the narrative verve of a novel

As addictive as Facebook... has the perfect dramatic narrative for a Hollywood thriller.

Bringing Down the House showed geeks outsmarting the casinos. Mezrich's latest focuses on two Harvard students who tried to build an online database of girls...and created Facebook

The New York Times bestseller and inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie, The Social Network 
 
Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg - an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius - were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university's entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students. Narrowly escaping expulsion, the two misfits refocused the site into something less controversial - 'The Facebook' - and watched as it spread like wildfire across campuses around the country, and their popularity exploded in the process. 
 
Yet amidst the dizzying levels of cash and glamour, as Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and reams of girls beckoned, the first cracks in their friendship started to appear. And what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. As Facebook rose to stratospheric heights by bringing people together - its very success tore two best friends apart.

Breaking Vegas

The book Vegas doesn't want you to read... 
 
Another page-turning true story of the underbelly of Las Vegas from Ben Mezrich, a successor to his bestselling Bringing Down the House.

Riveting . . . [Mezrich has] become a master at delivering fast-paced, tightly structured narratives that keep readers engaged every step of the way. . . Most impressive . . . What [Mezrich has] done, beautifully, is craft a riveting story about kids with excess brainpower taking on casinos with excess money. He has penned a gripping true-life adventure that will keep you reading well past your bedtime

A very enjoyable read that makes you feel like you're right there in Vegas playing along. Semyon's story is a fascinating, true life adventure

Very stylish and captivating. . . Mezrich brilliantly captures the tension and excitement. . . A must read at all costs

Glamorous, exciting and true, it's a tale to send the Oceans Eleven back to bussing tables for tips

It's fast paced and believable, but does it really tell you how to win at blackjack? To find out, you'll have to buy the book, a small price to pay for the thousands you could make

For nearly five years, he was known as the 'Darling Of Las Vegas'; the biggest high roller to hit Sin City in decades, a hotshot, twenty one year-old kid with a seemingly unlimited bankroll and an even more unlimited lust for big money action. His name was Semyon Dukatch, and stories swirled in his wake. Some said he was a Russian arms dealer, others a pop star from Eastern Europe. But the truth was even more unlikely: he was a twenty-one year old graduate student who had a plan that would one day make him richer than anyone could possibly imagine. 
 
The Darling of Las Vegas quickly became a legend in the casino world. He is the only person banned from the island of Aruba. He was held, at gunpoint, in a cave in Monte Carlo and told that if he ever returned, he'd be murdered. And he made millions of dollars playing blackjack, using three simple techniques that gave him the edge, techniques that are revealed in this book for the first time. 
 
This is his story, the ultimate true story of Las Vegas, the book Vegas doesn't want you to read...

Ugly Americans

Another extraordinary real-life thriller from the author of the bestselling book and inspiration for the film 21, Bringing Down the House. Ugly Americans is a true story of money, greed and risk set in the Wild East of 1990s Japan.

The author of the compelling Bringing Down the House ... returns with another vivid true story ... Any movie shouldn't lack for colour

When the movie rights to a novel are snapped up by Hollywood A-lister Kevin Spacey, you know its something special. And Ugly Americans most definitely is ... An incredible true story ... it's impossible not to be amazed and absorbed into this parallel universe where East meets West, gangsters meet cowboys and everyone is just an earthquake away from disaster

The propulsive narrative fairly roars "guilty pleasure." Yet Ugly Americans is revelatory, a rush that leaves the reader reeling but reflective

[Contains] all the ingredients of a great narrative - a main character the reader can relate to, an appealing love interest, money, danger, the need for acceptance, suspense ... In a truly engaging look at how an innocent who thinks he knows the world does actually end up understanding a small but significant piece of it, Mezrich manages to incorporate solid journalism into a narrative that just plain works

A high-octane passion play pitting a young man's ambition against his sense of humanity

The true story of the Ivy League hedge fund cowboys who gambled with the dangerously high stakes of the Asian stock market. 
 
John Malcolm, high school football hero and Princeton graduate made his millions back in the early '90s, a time when dozens of elite young American graduates made their fortunes in hedge funds in the Far East, beating the Japanese at their own game, riding the crashing waves of the Asian stock markets, gambling at impossibly high stakes and winning. Failure meant not only bankruptcy and disgrace à la Nick Leeson, but potentially even death - at the hands of the Japanese Yakuza: one of the world's most notoriously violent organised crime syndicates. 
 
Ugly Americans tells Malcolm's story, and that of others like him, in a high octane book, filled with glamour, money and the dangers these incur, this true story is a cross between Mezrich's own best-selling Bringing Down the House and Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.

Bringing Down The House

A gripping real-life financial action thriller, telling the story of a brilliant team of MIT students who won millions of dollars in Las Vegas. Ocean's Eleven, but for real. 
 
Adapted into the box office hit heist drama film 21, starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Bosworth.

... Bringing Down the House is a can't-miss deal

A lively tale that could pass for thriller fiction ... Mezrich's skilled yet easy writing draws sweat to the reader's brow

Bringing Down the House has a sensational story to tell

Astonishing real life tale, with enough info to do it yourself

'Seminal... Classic rags to riches, with lots of sex and plenty of danger, set in ever sparkling Las Vegas

Gripping. It is the gang's constant fear of being unmasked that makes this book so exciting. [I read] this thrilling book in almost one sitting - it is, to use that cliche, 'unputdownable'. A book that will surely become a classic of its genre

Real life all too rarely offers stories that are quite as satisfying as fiction. Bringing Down the House is one of the exceptions: a real-life action thriller oozing with money, sex and some extremely dodgy dealing... 
 
Cheating in casinos is illegal; card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. But casinos understandably dislike the practice and make every effort to keep card-counters out of their premises. Bringing Down the House tells the true story of the most successful financial scam ever, in which teams of brilliant young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos and blackjack tables of Las Vegas, in the process getting drawn into the high life of drugs, sex and spending big. 
 
Bringing Down the House is as readable and as fascinating as Liar's Poker or Barbarians At the Gate, an insight into a closed, excessive and utterly corrupt world of gambling in Las Vegas.

Ben Mezrich

A book to make X-Files fans twitch in excitement.

[A] tourist guide to US ufology that ticks all the boxes … an entertaining story.

[E]xtremely engaging … the inclusion of photos and important documents really helps the reader understand the intricacies of the investigation.

The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway

The 37th Parallel tells the true story of a computer programmer whose investigations into alien activity lead him deep into a vast conspiracy stretching 3000 miles across America. 
 
Chuck Zukowski is obsessed with tracking down UFO reports, but this innocent hobby takes on a sinister urgency when he makes a horrifying discovery. As he traces a series of incidents across Utah, Colorado and Kansas, a pattern emerges: a horizontal line of unexplained activity stretching right across America, a line some are calling the ‘UFO Highway’ or the ‘37th Parallel’. 
 
His extraordinary journey takes him from El Paso to the Pentagon, into secret underground military caverns and Indian sacred sites. This terrifying account will keep you awake at night, pondering some of the biggest and most inescapable questions humanity faces: are we really alone in this vast universe? And if not, who are our neighbours?

Ben Mezrich

Praise for The 37th Parallel

A book to make X-Files fans twitch in excitement.

[A] tourist guide to US ufology that ticks all the boxes … an entertaining story.

[E]xtremely engaging … the inclusion of photos and important documents really helps the reader understand the intricacies of the investigation.

A book to make X-Files fans twitch in excitement.

[A] tourist guide to US ufology that ticks all the boxes … an entertaining story.

[E]xtremely engaging … the inclusion of photos and important documents really helps the reader understand the intricacies of the investigation.

A book to make X-Files fans twitch in excitement.

[A] tourist guide to US ufology that ticks all the boxes … an entertaining story.

[E]xtremely engaging … the inclusion of photos and important documents really helps the reader understand the intricacies of the investigation.

Books by Ben Mezrich

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