The Silver Book
The glittering new queer love story and noirish thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
Queer love story meets true crime thriller in the dream factory of 1970s cinema, from the award-winning, bestselling author. Perfect for readers of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley.
SHORTLISTED FOR BLACKWELL’S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
A NEW YORK MAGAZINE TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
‘Sublime’ The New York Times
‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’
It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.
He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.
But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.
Stylish and seductive, The Silver Book is an absorbing fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.
Praise for The Silver Book:
‘Seamlessly inserts a fictional narrative into a real historical world . . . a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force’ Times Literary Supplement
‘A great chronicler of male genius, sexuality, loneliness and madness’ Observer
‘Unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic’ Art in America
‘You do not need to be an expert on postwar Italian cinema or politics (or to know the true crime story unfolding here) to savour this novel. Laing describes the filming in dazzling clarity. 1970s Rome swaggers from the page’ The Times
‘Laing’s vibrant depiction of both real and imagined events is a prescient exploration of the meaning of art in dangerous places’ Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Laing, who's written nonfiction about the lives of artists and one previous novel, Crudo, fuses the two forms with a lush narrative of art and love in 1970s Italy. The story unfolds over the year leading up to poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder in 1975, and its main character is Nicholas Wade, a young English artist who leaves London in September 1974 for Venice, fleeing unspecified trouble after a torrid affair with another man. Nicholas is sketching on the steps of San Vidal church when he meets costume designer and special effects artist Danilo Donati. Their one-night stand yields a yearlong apprenticeship for Nicholas, during which they work on two film productions, Federico Fellini's Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò. In the Rome studio and on location in the countryside, Donati teaches Nicholas how to make fake snow and excrement, and they fashion "sinister, peeling buildings" into sites of a Nazi massacre. Describing the often grotesque material, Danilo proclaims: "We're not perverts, we're labourers in the dream factory!" As the mystery of what happened in London finally comes to light, trouble comes for Pasolini as well. It's an intriguing plot, but most notable is Laing's lucid showcasing of the artists' fervent yet tender collaborations, born of a shared "love of liberty" and the "amusement rising" in a lover's eyes. The author's fans will adore this.
