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The Silver Book - Olivia Laing ‘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. Review Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet -- Philip HoareThe 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 PaulTransporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end -- Nigel SlaterA truly wonderful book -- Edmund de WaalErotic 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 ― Kirkus ReviewsAn enchanted tale of an accursed era . . . 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 . . . The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning -- Lucy SanteThis 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 CheeBy taking us on set during the filming of two of the strangest movies ever made, Olivia Laing’s new novel makes us wonder all over again at how facts can be turned into fiction, then back once again into glittering and suggestive fact. A love story dedicated to cinema, to queerness, and to the alchemy of all good art -- Neil BartlettMercurial, voluptuous, and knowing, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a portrait of Rome at a volatile moment, with la dolce vita turning sour and the dreaded 'Years of Lead' on the horizon, and a love-letter to 70s Italian cinema, with a tight focus on Pasolini, its elegiac heart. Vibrant on so many levels, from the intellectual to the carnal and the poetic, The Silver Book will have you in a trance from the first page to the last. How can the novel possibly be dead when Laing is writing as beautifully as this? -- Rupert ThomsonSuch a haunting, sad but creatively thrilling tale, told with delicate economy -- Neil Tennant About the Author An author and critic, Olivia Laing has written eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody: A Book About Freedom and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Their books have been translated into 21 languages.