Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia [Pan MacMillan] (9781509843886)

Gomorrah is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young mans impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.

With a preface to mark the ten year anniversary of publication, Roberto Savianos groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller which has to date sold 750,000 copies in Italy alone.

A groundbreaking study and a searing expose, Gomorrah is the astonishing true story of the renowned crime organization the Camorra, known by insiders as the System. With a global reach, large stakes in construction, high fashion, illegal drugs and toxic waste disposal, the Camorra exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast.

In pursuit of his subject, Roberto Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by the System, and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street. Since publishing the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection.