At once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema, The Silver Book is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.
‘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 Cinecitt , the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Sal , 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Imprint: Hamish Hamilton UK
Publication date: 11/11/2025
The Silver Book
By Olivia Laing
Review by Renata
Laing's second novel is set in the 1970s dream palace of Italian avant garde cinema, Cinecitta Studios. They convey the intensity and rigor that went into the creation of Federico Fellini’s Cassanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo and the sinister circumstances leading to the violent murder of Pasolini only weeks after Salo’s completion.
In reimagining the events leading to this event, Laing explores both the conditions that enable fascism, and the power of art to hold a mirror to the society that forms it. The novel combines detailed historical research with insightful imagination to create a haunting story of desire, creative obsession and repression. It powerfully conveys the way that secrecy and shame expose the marginalised to risk and danger. A coolly observed but passionately felt story.
