The Silver Book

A Novel

De: Olivia Laing

Art, power, desire, and illusion collide in a hypnotic new novel from Olivia Laing, set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975.

It is September 1974. Two men meet 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 realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. 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. Amid the rising tensions of Italy’s Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn’t intend.

Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

©2025 Olivia Laing (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“This is a novel to fall in love with—at least I did—a canny hustler of a novel, brilliant, obsessive, hot, and yet it is also like the light on the water at night in Venice. This is the kind of novel you steal from your spouse or vice versa. And it is the work of an artist at the height of their powers—as if I could admire Laing more.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is an enchanted tale of an accursed era. Young Nicholas’s coming of age and romantic adventures are set against the violent period in 1970s Italy known as the Years of Lead. In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecittà when its creative masters were at their peak: Federico Fellini, Danilo Donati, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning.”—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name

“The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn’t an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative.”—Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait