Reading List

Authors Like Roberto Saviano

Q: What should I read after Gomorrah?

Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers (1995) for the Sicilian Mafia and the magistrates who fought it, and Misha Glenny’s McMafia (2008) for the global picture. Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl (1961) is the classic novel behind both.

Q: Does Roberto Saviano have a new book?

His most recent book is L’amore mio non muore, published by Einaudi in May 2025. It tells the story of Rossella Casini, a Florentine student who disappeared in Palmi, Calabria, in 1981 and is recognised as a victim of the ’Ndrangheta.

Q: Is Gomorrah a true story?

Yes. Gomorrah is non-fiction, written in the first person from Saviano’s own reporting. In a civil case brought in 2008, Italian courts found that short passages reproduced two local newspaper articles without credit; in July 2026 the Court of Cassation upheld damages of ten thousand euros, describing the passages as brief and marginal to the book.

Q: Which Roberto Saviano book should I read first?

Gomorrah (2006), the book that made his name and led to his police protection. If you prefer fiction, start with The Piranhas (2016), his novel about teenage gang bosses in Naples.

In 2006 Roberto Saviano, a 26-year-old from Naples, published Gomorrah, an account of the Camorra built from what he had seen himself: the port where contraband came in, the crime scenes, the funerals and the trials. He took his title from Don Peppe Diana, a parish priest in Casal di Principe murdered by the Camorra in 1994, who had written that the time had come to stop being a Gomorrah. On 13 October 2006, after threats from the Casalesi clan, the Italian state gave Saviano a police escort, and he has lived under protection ever since. By the end of 2008 the book had sold almost four million copies. In March 2026 Italy’s highest court made final the sentence of a Casalesi boss for threatening him during a trial. The ten writers below share his method: they go and look, they name names, and they show organised power through the ordinary people it falls on.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Organised crime · Investigative journalism · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you admire Roberto Saviano, start with Leonardo Sciascia, whose The Day of the Owl (1961) is a Sicilian novel about a Mafia killing and the silence around it, and Alexander Stille, whose Excellent Cadavers (1995) tells the story of the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. Lydia Cacho, who shared the 2011 Olof Palme Prize with Saviano, also investigates organised crime under threat. Further down are the Neapolitan novelist who shows the same streets from inside the family, and the book that made the Mafia glamorous.

10 authors like Roberto Saviano

The Mafia novel before Gomorrah

Leonardo Sciascia

Italian · The Day of the Owl (1961), To Each His Own (1966)

Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, Sicily, in 1921 and died in Palermo in 1989. The Day of the Owl follows a carabinieri captain from Parma investigating a murder in a Sicilian town where nobody admits to having seen anything. He later sat in the Italian parliament for the Radical Party. In January 1987 a Corriere della Sera article of his, headlined “I professionisti dell’antimafia”, criticised the way Paolo Borsellino had been appointed chief prosecutor of Marsala, and he was widely attacked for it.

The Italian writer who made the Mafia a subject for serious fiction a generation before Saviano, and also the one who complicates him most: Sciascia warned that fighting the Mafia could itself become a career. Read him for the silence Saviano breaks, and for the question of who gets to speak against it.

— Lisanne

Going to see for yourself

George Orwell

British · The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Orwell was born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, in 1903. For The Road to Wigan Pier he stayed among miners and their families in the north of England; Homage to Catalonia is his account of fighting with a militia in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot in the throat in 1937. He died in London in 1950, the year after Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared.

Orwell set the pattern Saviano follows: the writer as witness, putting his own body in the scene and saying what it felt like. Both write about how power works on people with little money and no protection.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

The myth Saviano writes against

Mario Puzo

American · The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), The Godfather (1969)

Puzo was born in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, in 1920 to immigrants from the province of Avellino, inland from Naples, and died in 1999. The Godfather follows the Corleone crime family in postwar New York and became Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film; Puzo won Oscars for the screenplays of the first two films. He said the novel came from research, not from personal experience of the Mafia.

Read Puzo to understand the image Saviano is fighting: the boss as a man of honour and family. Matteo Garrone’s film of Gomorrah shows a real Camorra villa built as a copy of Tony Montana’s in Scarface, and Saviano keeps asking what such fictions do to the boys who grow up on them.

— Lisanne

The magistrates who were killed

Alexander Stille

American · Benevolence and Betrayal (1991), Excellent Cadavers (1995)

Stille was born in New York in 1957. Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic tells the story of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Palermo magistrates who prosecuted Cosa Nostra and were murdered by it in 1992. His earlier Benevolence and Betrayal, about five Italian Jewish families under Fascism, won the Los Angeles Times book award.

The essential background to Saviano’s Solo è il coraggio (2022), his book about Falcone. Stille writes as a reporter and historian rather than a witness, which makes him the calmer companion to Saviano’s first person.

— Lisanne

Reporting at the cost of a life

Anna Politkovskaya

Russian · A Dirty War (2001), Putin’s Russia (2004)

Politkovskaya was born in New York in 1958 to Soviet diplomats and wrote for Novaya Gazeta from 1999, above all about the war in Chechnya. She was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block on 7 October 2006. Five men were convicted of the murder in 2014, but who ordered it remains unclear.

She was killed six days before Saviano was given his police escort. Both treat reporting as a moral act, name the victims, and refuse the neutral voice; Politkovskaya’s subject is a state, Saviano’s a criminal economy that lives alongside one.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anna Politkovskaya →

Shared his prize, and his danger

Lydia Cacho

Mexican · Slavery Inc. (2014)

Cacho was born in Mexico City in 1963. After Los demonios del Edén, her investigation of a child sexual-abuse network, she was arrested in Cancún by Puebla state police and driven about 900 miles to Puebla to face defamation charges; a recording of the state governor discussing her jailing later became public. Slavery Inc. follows the international sex trade. In 2011 she and Saviano shared the Olof Palme Prize.

The closest match in method: Cacho, like Saviano, follows the money behind crimes that look local and finds a global trade. She writes with a feminist focus on the women and children that trade consumes.

— Lisanne

The global map of crime

Misha Glenny

British · McMafia (2008), Nemesis (2015)

Glenny, born in 1958, made his name reporting on Central and Eastern Europe and wrote The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992). McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld traces how organised crime spread across the world; it became a BBC One drama, with Glenny as an executive producer. Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio follows a drug lord in a Rio de Janeiro favela.

Where ZeroZeroZero follows cocaine around the world, Glenny follows the whole criminal economy. He is less personal than Saviano and more interested in systems, which makes him a good second book for anyone who wants the global picture.

— Lisanne

The cartels, from Mexico City

Ioan Grillo

British · El Narco (2011)

Grillo is an English journalist who grew up in Brighton and lives in Mexico City. El Narco is a history of the Mexican drug cartels that describes them as a criminal insurgency, a reading some critics dispute because the cartels have no ideology. The book is critical of both the Mexican and the US governments’ drug war.

The Mexican chapters of ZeroZeroZero cover the same ground. Grillo writes as a foreign correspondent rather than a native son, which gives him a distance from his subject that Saviano never has from Naples.

— Lisanne

The same city, from inside the family

Elena Ferrante

Italian · My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of the Lost Child (2014)

Ferrante has written under a pseudonym since her first novel in 1992 and has never confirmed who she is. The four Neapolitan novels follow Lila and Lenù, born in a poor district of Naples in 1944, across six decades. The Solara brothers, who run the neighbourhood through money-lending and intimidation, stand behind much of what happens to them.

Saviano reports the clans from the street; Ferrante shows what a neighbourhood run by men like the Solaras does to the girls and women who grow up in it. Read them together for Naples seen from outside the home and inside it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elena Ferrante →

Another code of silence

Patrick Radden Keefe

American · Say Nothing (2018), Empire of Pain (2021)

Keefe, born in 1976, is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Say Nothing starts from the 1972 abduction and killing of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten, by the IRA, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize. Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and OxyContin, won the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Keefe writes about a code of silence in another country: the IRA’s rather than the Camorra’s. Like Saviano he builds a whole system out of individual cases, but he keeps himself out of the frame.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patrick Radden Keefe →

Where to start if you loved Roberto Saviano

If you loved Gomorrah, read Alexander Stille.

Excellent Cadavers: the Palermo magistrates who took on Cosa Nostra, and what it cost them.

If you want fiction about the Mafia, read Leonardo Sciascia.

The Day of the Owl: a murder in a Sicilian town where nobody saw anything.

If you loved ZeroZeroZero, read Misha Glenny.

McMafia: how organised crime became a global business.

If you want Naples as a novel, read Elena Ferrante.

My Brilliant Friend: two girls, one neighbourhood, and the men who run it.

If you want more Roberto Saviano, read him in order.

Gomorrah (2006), then his Naples novel The Piranhas (2016) and its sequel Savage Kiss (2017). His most recent book, L’amore mio non muore, was published in Italian in May 2025.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Roberto Saviano

Who writes like Roberto Saviano?

Leonardo Sciascia, Alexander Stille and Lydia Cacho are the closest matches. Sciascia wrote the Sicilian Mafia into fiction, Stille wrote the history of the magistrates who fought Cosa Nostra, and Cacho, who shared the 2011 Olof Palme Prize with Saviano, investigates organised crime in Mexico under threat.

What should I read after Gomorrah?

Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers (1995) for the Sicilian Mafia and the magistrates who fought it, and Misha Glenny’s McMafia (2008) for the global picture. Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl (1961) is the classic novel behind both.

Does Roberto Saviano have a new book?

His most recent book is L’amore mio non muore, published by Einaudi in May 2025. It tells the story of Rossella Casini, a Florentine student who disappeared in Palmi, Calabria, in 1981 and is recognised as a victim of the ’Ndrangheta.

Is Gomorrah a true story?

Yes. Gomorrah is non-fiction, written in the first person from Saviano’s own reporting. In a civil case brought in 2008, Italian courts found that short passages reproduced two local newspaper articles without credit; in July 2026 the Court of Cassation upheld damages of ten thousand euros, describing the passages as brief and marginal to the book.

Which Roberto Saviano book should I read first?

Gomorrah (2006), the book that made his name and led to his police protection. If you prefer fiction, start with The Piranhas (2016), his novel about teenage gang bosses in Naples.

Is Roberto Saviano like Elena Ferrante?

Both write about Naples and the hold of the clans over ordinary lives, but in different ways. Saviano reports in his own voice, while Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels follow two women across six decades and keep crime mostly at the edge of the story.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Roberto Saviano

10 authors like Roberto Saviano

Leonardo Sciascia

George Orwell

Mario Puzo

Alexander Stille

Anna Politkovskaya

Lydia Cacho

Misha Glenny

Ioan Grillo

Elena Ferrante

Patrick Radden Keefe

Where to start if you loved Roberto Saviano

Frequently asked questions about authors like Roberto Saviano

Who writes like Roberto Saviano?

What should I read after Gomorrah?

Does Roberto Saviano have a new book?

Is Gomorrah a true story?

Which Roberto Saviano book should I read first?

Is Roberto Saviano like Elena Ferrante?

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