The Silver Book

By: Olivia Laing

Narrated by: Ben Cura

Brought to you by Penguin.

‘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.

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

© Olivia Laing 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critic reviews

Laing’s accomplished second novel, The Silver Book, feels like a precision-controlled environment. In taut sentences, Laing evokes the sensuous eroticism and incipient danger of it 1970s Italian setting, moving towards a shattering conclusion . . . rigorously researched and realised historical fiction (Patricia Nicol)

Donati is described as an “illusionist”. So, too, is Laing, who seamlessly inserts a fictional narrative into a real historical world . . . a prose that pares down and transforms the messiness of the real into sentence after sentence of unforced lucidity . . . the author’s scene-setting is managed with deftness . . . a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force (Lucasta Miller)

Sublime . . . where the book really soars is in its visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking . . . Laing’s prose is taut and cleareyed . . . This unsentimental style brings the 1970s Italian cinema scene to vivid life, making the work of Pasolini and Fellini feel fresh, daring and urgent (Christopher Bollen)

Laing draws on the Italian director’s unsolved murder for their sumptuous second novel . . . A great chronicler of male genius, sexuality, loneliness and madness . . . Laing has such a gift for capturing shimmering details (Olivia Ovenden)

The Silver Book, an absorbing amalgam of fact and fiction, exalts Salo as an admonitory horror masterwork of our times (Ian Thompson)

Set on surreal Italian film sets, this noir-tinged novel explores queer desire, creativity and dangerous secrets. Loosely based on real events, it captures the glamour and moral fog of the 1970s art world

An arresting narrative about art, filmmaking, and desire in 1970s Italy . . . Shimmery and dreamlike, The Silver Book lives up to the promise of its name

A transportive, hot-blooded book, flooded by Roman light, sticky heat, and scooter exhaust—and a potent tribute to the fierce, uncompromising vision of Pasolini, whose dark warnings have come home to roost fifty years later

Laing’s background as an arts writer, and their clear love of visual art, comes through in the language of beauty and pleasure that suffuses The Silver Book . . . The text is unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic, a delight to read . . . they have a gift for capturing the subtle fluctuations of yearning and desire . . . Laing’s strength as a biographer and historian makes The Silver Book sing on a deeper level; their lush, beautiful prose is backed by meticulous research . . . In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing’s novel feels eerily timely (Emily Watlington)

Erotic romance, moviemaking audacity, and looming dread co-exist in this arresting fact-based novel set in Italy’s hazardous 1970s. A mesmerizing, contemplative, and haunting work of historical fiction