“With the openhearted rashness that belongs to every true writer, Saviano returns to tell the story of the fierce and grieving heart of Naples.” —Elena Ferrante In Gomorrah, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, Roberto Saviano revealed a true, devastating portrait of Naples, Italy under the rule of the Camorra, a crime organization more powerful and violent than the Mafia. In The Piranhas, the international bestselling author returns to his home city with an audiobook about gang warfare and a young man’s dark desire to rise to the top of Naples’s underworld. Nicolas Fiorillo is a brilliant and ambitious fifteen-year-old from the slums of Naples, eager to make his mark and to acquire power and the money that comes with it. With nine friends, he sets out to create a new paranza, or gang. Together they roam the streets on their motorscooters, learning how to break into the network of small-time hoodlums that controls drug-dealing and petty crime in the city. They learn to cheat and to steal, to shoot semiautomatic pistols and AK-47s. Slowly they begin to wrest control of the neighborhoods from enemy gangs while making alliances with failing old bosses. Nicolas’s strategic brilliance is prodigious, and his cohorts’ rapid rise and envelopment in the ensuing maelstrom of violence and death is riveting and impossible to turn away from. In The Piranhas, Roberto Saviano imagines the lurid glamour of Nicolas’s story with all the vividness and insight that made Gomorrah a worldwide sensation.
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“With the open-hearted rashness that belongs to every true writer, Saviano returns to tell the story of the fierce and grieving heart of Naples.”
— Elena Ferrante, New York Times bestselling author
"…the emotional truth of Saviano’s account is unassailable. I could not get this brave book out of my head.”
— The New York Times on GomorrahBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Roberto Saviano was born in Naples and studied philosophy at the University of Naples. He has contributed articles to the New York Times, among other publications, and Gomorrah, his first book, won the 2006 Viareggio Literary Prize. Following its publication, Saviano received numerous threats against his life by offended parties, after which time he announced his intention to leave Italy so he might stop having to live as a convict and reclaim his life.
Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, director, film producer, and multiaward–winning narrator. He has won several Audie Awards for best narration, including for 2019’s Best Male Narrator of the Year. He was named by Booklist as winner of their 2023 Voice of Choice Award, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, from classics to modern masters, from bestsellers to the inspirational, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners to spine-tingling series, and much more. In television and film, he is best known for his roles in A Murder at the End of the World, The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush, and Romeo Must Die. He is also trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.