The acclaimed author of The Lonely City and Crudo comes to Foyles for an evening of conversation with Neil Bartlett for the launch of The Silver Book, Laing’s cinematic and sensual new novel.
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.
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.
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They are 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 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
Neil Bartlett is an acclaimed queer theatre director and novelist. His most recent mainstream theatre pieces in London were a live rendition of Derek Jarman’s BLUE and an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; his most recent novel was Address Book.
The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.
