The City of the Living

A CRIMEREADS AND WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023

From Nicola Lagioia, winner of the Strega Prize for Fiction, a spellbinding literary thriller based on the true story of one of the most vicious crimes in recent Italian history. An intoxicating novel that takes readers on a surprising journey into the darkest corners of contemporary Rome and of the human soul.

In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, two “ordinary” young men from good families, brutally murdered twenty-three-year-old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves through Rome and beyond. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing? Or were they possessed? And if the latter, possessed by what?

Based on months of interviews, court documentation, and correspondence with the killers themselves, The City of the Living is not only a fast-paced, revelatory thriller in the style of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, it is also a descent into the dark heart of Rome—a city that is unlivable and yet teeming with life, overrun by rats and wild animals, and plagued by corruption, drugs, and violence. Yet, the Eternal City is also a place that, more than any other in the world, seems to inspire a sense of absolute freedom in its inhabitants.

Proceeding in concentric circles, Nicola Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, inability to grow up, economic grievances, crises of identity—progressively tightening the focus of the analysis to locate the breaking point after which anything is possible. As hypnotic as Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, an heir to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and destined to cast on spell on fans of the Morbid podcast, The City of the Living is Nicola Lagioia’s most gripping, bestselling, and critically acclaimed novel to-date. Razor-sharp, unputdownable, devastating, it is the story not only of a crime but of human nature itself; of the tension between responsibility and guilt, between the drive to oppress and the desire to be free; of who we are and who we can become.

TARGET CONSUMER

- For readers of literary thrillers, true crime books, and literary fiction that offers a broader analysis of the tensions and faultines of a place or a society
- Readers of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, Nothing but the Night by Greg King and Penny Wilson, The Butcher and the Wren by Alain Urquhart, Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Leila Slimani’s Perfect Nanny, Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
- Listeners of Morbid & Serial podcasts; fans of Elio Petri’s 1970 Academy Award-winning classic, Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line

KEY SELLING POINTS

- The new book by one of Italy’s most prominent writers, winner of the Strega Prize and director of the Turin Book Fair
- The book was a best-seller in Italy, received universal critical acclaim and extensive media coverage, including a dedicated podcast (in the style of Sarah Koenig’s Serial)
- TV adaptation currently being produced
- Author endorsements to come: Alain Urquhart, Lisa Taddeo, Leil Silmani, Bret Easton Ellis, Teju Cole, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe, Robert Koehler
- The book pierces through the stereotypical representation of Rome as the idyllic city of “la dolce vita” to reveal its profound moral and social corruption
- Translated by superstar translator Ann Goldstein (translator of Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alba de Cespedes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Primo Levi, and Elena Ferrante)