Roberto Saviano, the Italian writer whose bestselling expose' of the Naples Mafia led to a life in police protection, is set to publish his second book.
La Bellezza e l'Inferno (Beauty and Hell) will hit Italian bookshops in mid-June as the long-awaited follow-up to Saviano's 2006 Gomorra, an insider's tale of the Camorra crime syndicate.
Gomorra, a play on the name Camorra and the Biblical sin city Gomorrah, was so successful that Saviano's chief target, the Casalesi clan, put out a bounty on the writer.
The threat against the 29-year-old writer increased when his tale was turned into a film of the same name that won second prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
Saviano has said that the pressures of his life under guard have greatly interfered with his writing and the new book is believed to be largely a collection of previously published magazine articles.
But the 25 articles, including a new one written specially for the book, ''have been reworked and reorganised according to themes so as to convey his vision of life, of political and social commitment, and art between the poles of beauty and hell,'' according to a note from the publisher, Mondadori.
Gomorra won eight literary prizes in Italy and was named among the best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Economist, the first book to achieve that distinction.
It has sold more than two million copies in Italy and been translated in 42 countries, appearing on bestseller lists in Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, Sweden and Finland.
