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
