The Silver Book is a fictionalization of the lives of real crew members on the set of the infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. We follow Nicholas who finds himself in Italy in 1975 after running from a mysterious past in London. There, he finds Dani, an older man known for his creative work as a costume and production designer for many famous Italian directors, who invites him into life and into his career. Together, the two men navigate being queer in an environment with an increasing threat of fascism while working on a highly controversial film critiquing said threats.


The novel is a quick read, consisting of short, vignette-like chapters. The atmosphere, social critiques, and overall writing style creates a slow yet haunting narrative. My only critique is that I wish it could’ve been longer; the characters felt like they could have had a bit more time to feel more real.

Don’t be discouraged to read this if you haven’t seen the films mentioned! I hadn’t seen them and still totally understood everything happening.

I’d recommend this if you like thinky books about art, culture, sexuality, and politics, and the darkness that can hide beneath.

I read Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time earlier this year, and had high expectations for The Silver Book. Granted, the former is nonfiction—but Laing's ability to carry the reader along as she unfurls the history of the British garden was magical. I found myself jotting down the names of gardens and the sociopolitical history behind them. While The Silver Book is also filled with incredibly interesting facts and figures, it's about an entirely different animal—fascism.

It's 1974, and avant-garde directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the novel mixes fact and fiction) can employ the best in the business. And one of them is Dani, an exquisitely gifted designer whose sets, attention to detail, and frenetic drive mask a wounded, lonely soul who ensnares beautiful young men in his free time. Enter Nicholas, who has fled London—and a lucrative stint as a kept man—for Italy. It's a fortuitous meeting, as despite his rent boy appearance, he's a Slade-trained artist from a public school background. Nicholas is soon working for Dani in the heady mix of boundary-pushing post-Mussolini cinema.

Pasolini, who remembers the horrors of fascism firsthand, invites Dani to work on the set of his film Salò, which sends up the hypocrisy of a modern Italy. It will take chapters and chapters to string the above narrative together because for Laing, the ways in which Western fascism manifests itself, overtly and covertly, takes precedence over storytelling. The characters are written as if they’re in a script waiting for an actor, or writer, to breathe life into them.

As a detailed, behind the scenes look at movie production—and the lives of a specific subset of gay men in 1970s Britain and Italy—the Silver Book is captivating. But as a novel, it's as cold and withholding as the fascists who takes Pasolini’s life; the parents who exile children who don’t meet their bourgeois expectations; and fair weather friends who act as agents of a society that depends on their complicity. Perhaps that’s the point.

Many, many thanks to NetGalley for an ARC.

Beautiful sweeping story of love, purpose and the meaning of reality set in 1974-1975 Italy around making of a film and the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Danilo Donati picks up a young English man in Venice and sweeps him into the world of cinema where reality can be anything you make it. In the “looking glass world” of the Cinecittà, Nicholas is entranced but confused as he tries to reinvent himself. While the murder of Pasolini ends the story, his film Salò about “the permanent migration” of meaning underscores the precarious world of love, especially for those not allowed to openly express theirs. I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this fascinating book.