Beauty and the Inferno

Gomorrah , Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé of

Naples’s Camorra mafia, was an international

bestseller and became an award-winning film.

But the death threats that followed forced the

author into hiding. Saviano was ostracized by his

countrymen and went on the run, changing his

location every few months and compelled to keep

perpetual company with his bodyguards. To this

day, he lives in an undisclosed location.

The loneliness of the fugitive life informs all the

essays in Beauty and the Inferno , Saviano’s first

book since Gomorrah. Among other subjects, he

writes about the legendary South African jazz

singer Miriam Makeba, his meeting with the real-life

Donnie Brasco, sharing the Nobel Academy

platform with Salman Rushdie, and the murdered

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Present

throughout the book is a sense of Saviano’s

peculiar isolation, which infuses his words with

anger, exceptional insight and tragedy.