The Silver Book

Laing’s gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time

Financial Times

Laing belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience

New York Times

I am in awe of Olivia Laing’s insights, braininess, and that something that feels like recklessness until it lands

Peter Carey

Simply one of our most exciting writers

Observer

The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn't an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative

Celia Paul

Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet

Philip Hoare

By taking us on set during the filming of two of the strangest movies ever made, Olivia Laing’s new novel makes us wonder all over again at how facts can be turned into fiction, then back once again into glittering and suggestive fact. A love story dedicated to cinema, to queerness, and to the alchemy of all good art

Neil Bartlett

An enthralling read. So many exquisite images conjured and a driving sense of political and emotional passion. I loved it

Maria Balshaw, Director of the Tate

Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end

Nigel Slater

Such a haunting, sad but creatively thrilling tale, told with delicate economy

Neil Tennant

Mercurial, voluptuous, and knowing, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a portrait of Rome at a volatile moment, with la dolce vita turning sour and the dreaded 'Years of Lead' on the horizon, and a love-letter to 70s Italian cinema, with a tight focus on Pasolini, its elegiac heart. Vibrant on so many levels, from the intellectual to the carnal and the poetic, The Silver Book will have you in a trance from the first page to the last. How can the novel possibly be dead when Laing is writing as beautifully as this?

Rupert Thomson

An enchanted tale of an accursed era . . . In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecittà when its creative masters were at their peak . . . The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning

Lucy Sante