Storysmith’s Book of the Year 2025 author Olivia Laing in conversation to mark the paperback release of The Silver Book, followed by a screening of Federico Fellini’s Casanova! 

The Silver Book is a sumptuous gem of a novel that our booksellers have been obsessed with since it came out last year, and we cannot wait to welcome its author back to Bristol (they were last with us back in 2024 for a sold-out event for The Garden Against Time). This will be an extra-special event, followed by Fellini’s 1976 cult classic starring Donald Sutherland and with costume design by Danilo Donati (The Silver Book).

Olivia will be in conversation with Aneet Nijjar, founder of the acid arthouse film company Other Parties.

About Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They are a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Photo credit: Chiara Barzini

About The Silver Book
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 Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled.

Then 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. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.

Praise for The Silver Book:‘Seamlessly inserts a fictional narrative into a real historical world… a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force’ Times Literary Supplement ‘A great chronicler of male genius, sexuality, loneliness and madness’ Observer

‘Unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic’ Art in America‘You do not need to be an expert on postwar Italian cinema or politics (or to know the true crime story unfolding here) to savour this novel.

Laing describes the filming in dazzling clarity. 1970s Rome swaggers from the page’ The Times

‘Laing’s vibrant depiction of both real and imagined events is a prescient exploration of the meaning of art in dangerous places’ Washington Post

IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT TIMINGS:

Olivia Laing event starts: 18:30 (doors 18:00)
Olivia Laing Signing: 19:30
Casanova screening: 20:15
Please aim to arrive 30 minutes before the start time for the author event or the screening.