The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

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
RUNNER-UP FOR THE TADEUSZ BRADECKI PRIZE 2026

‘Sublime’ The New York Times

'Brilliant' Olly Alexander

‘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

'My favourite novel of last year' M. John Harrison

‘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