Pricing
Paperback $16.95
Description
The modern Italian classic about Calabrian organized crime—now an award-winning motion picture—makes its English-language debut.
In the remote Aspromonte Mountains in southern Calabria, Italy, three best friends embark on a life of crime in order to raise themselves up out of the poverty of their childhoods and the...
The modern Italian classic about Calabrian organized crime—now an award-winning motion picture—makes its English-language debut.
In the remote Aspromonte Mountains in southern Calabria, Italy, three best friends embark on a life of crime in order to raise themselves up out of the poverty of their childhoods and the suffering of their parents. Brainy Luciano, the behind-the-scenes schemer, was orphaned as a little boy when the local mob boss had his postman father executed. Lazy, jovial Luigi has learned that there’s no point in following the rules, since there is no path to riches for poor boys. And completing the triumvirate is the nameless narrator, from whose black soul comes the inspiration and energy for each new criminal project, from kidnapping to armed robbery to heroin dealing to contract killing.
Set in the lush Aspromonte forest in an unnamed town inspired by the author’s native Africo, the birthplace of the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s ruthless and ubiquitous mafia, Black Souls draws on centuries of brigand lore, peasant rebellion history, mountain mythology, and colonial suffering to offer a gripping morality tale about how violence begets violence. The novel tells the cultural history of a disaffected people who have taken destructive paths into organized crime as a means of exploiting a system that has exploited them for hundreds of years.
Media
“A Sunday Times Crime Club Starred Selection.”
“In Black Souls, crime is a tragedy, not a cliché. Criaco tells a forgotten part of Italy.”
—La Stampa
“The black hole of Calabria, land of the 'Ndrangheta, seen from an insider's perspective.”
—La Repubblica
“A harsh and poignant novel, a lucid photograph of a world ruled by violence.”
—The North-Pas-De-Calais Gazette
“Criaco succeeds in bringing the reader into the dark universe of the black souls of Calabria.”
—Metropolis
“I was struck by Gioacchino Criaco's novel, by the emotional and visceral nature of its writing, of its ability to deal with boys entering the crime world without exalting violence. He delimits good and evil, but he puts himself in the shoes of the guys he's talking about, in their wrong, cruel, defeated destinies.”
—Francesco Munzi, director of Anime Nere, the film adaptation of Black Souls
“Criaco’s debut novel is equally successful as gritty gangland chronicle, tribute to the bonds of brotherhood, and full-sensory ode to his beloved Calabrian mountains. Criaco’s incisive social commentary and unflinching realism will appeal to fans of Scandinavian and American crime fiction, but his confidential, folkloric voice sets this story apart.”
–Booklist, Starred Review on Black Souls
“Powerful, haunting and lyrical, with an insider's true and tender understanding of the world he escaped.”
–Sunday Times Crime Club, Starred Selection on Black Souls
“Deep and slow, [Black Souls] ranges over the youth, coming of age, and violent criminality of a nearly nameless narrator. His love for the landscape and the men in his family is a warm and restless ocean in which the crimes of the book roll, surge, and multiply.”
–New York Journal of Books
“There are few comparable crime novels today. Stuart Neville’s haunted fiction set in the Troubles of Ireland may come close.”
–Kittling Books
“Criaco’s novel is an epic crime saga told with incredible intimacy, a moving and personal story that also relays the criminal history of a region—Calabria, Italy, long an outlaw territory and more recently the home of the clans and cliques that make up the ‘Ndrangheta mafia.”