Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia

26 May, 2015
Author: Roberto Saviano
Genre: Current Affairs
Category: Heywood Hill Readers

Recommended by Heywood Hill Reader Harry Mount:

'I read Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah - Italy's Other Mafia when I was in Rome recently. The story of the Camorra - the mob that runs Naples - was a marvellous corrective to cypress-and-Chianti memoirs of Italy.

Saviano recounts, with unrelenting candour, the full horrors: the fortunes made from drugs, fake luxury goods, illegal rubbish dumps and construction deals; the teenage girl tortured and murdered for failing to reveal the whereabouts of her ex-boyfriend.

He's also very funny - as in his tale of the pious don who says, "I like nativity scenes; I just can't stand the poverty of the shepherds!"'

Harry Mount’s Odyssey - Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus is published by Bloomsbury in July 2015. He is also the author of How England Made the English (Viking).