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Also by Olivia Laing:

The Silver Book, November 2025
Hardcover / e-Book
The Trip To Echo Spring, January 2014
Hardcover / e-Book

The Silver Book
Olivia Laing

A Novel

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2025
On Sale: November 11, 2025
256 pages
ISBN: 0374618313
EAN: 9780374618315
Kindle: B0DVQXZR6Y
Hardcover / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction Literary | Historical

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 illusionist 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 brings Nicholas back 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 didn’t intend.

Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noir-ish 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.

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