Ebook: Beauty and the Inferno: Essays

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.