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Published Jul 2018
128 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
A "wild west" tale of two brothers who battle both the state and a mafia empire in 1920s Italy, from famed Italian author Andrea Camilleri.
Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the State. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don't know what to do: no one in the village has ever dared denounce the Mafia before. From that moment on, the Sacco brothers must defend themselves: from the Mafia and the forces of order, from their collaborators, traitors, and from the village's leaders, as they are assailed by murder attempts, false accusations, and false testimony.
Through the tale of the Sacco brothers and what happens to the town of Raffadali, The Sacco Gang makes clear that not only does the mafia kill people, but it can also condition and irreparably devastate people's lives.
"This is a riveting story of how organized crime, political corruption, and judicial duplicity can oppress freedom." - Publishers Weekly
"The people are not fully developed characters as much as figures standing in for their fates - which is not a criticism but exactly what is to be expected when a story is told in this way. That doesn't keep the reader from longing for a bit more dramatization or, at least, the audiobook, where the right narrator could give this appalling and tragic story the fabulist element it needs. The injustice here has an immediacy; the tale itself feels part of legend." - Kirkus
"If history is the story of the winners and the powerful, it's not only the fault of historians; the fact is that the traces of the past with which they work - 'documents' - are left by those arranging for their own posterity ... Camilleri rebels against this fiction, creating another, more refined and luminous one." - La Repubblica (Italy)
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Pensiero
Andrea Camilleri was one of Italy's most famous contemporary writers. His books sold over 65 million copies worldwide. The Inspector Montalbano series, which began with The Shape of Water, has been translated into thirty-two languages and was adapted for Italian television, screened on BBC4. In addition to his phenomenally successful Inspector Montalbano series, he was also the author of the historical comic mysteries Hunting Season and The Brewer of Preston. He died aged 93 in 2019.
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