The Silver Book

Author: Olivia Laing

Of specific Gay interest

Published on 6 November 2025 by Penguin Books Ltd (Hamish Hamilton Ltd) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 256 pages
224 x 145 x 27 | 364g

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 Fellinis Casanova. A young and beautiful apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecitt, the studio where Casanovas Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Sal, Pasolinis 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 Italys Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didnt intend.

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