The Piranhas
The Boy Bosses of Naples: A Novel
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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, now a major motion picture, the international bestselling author returns to his home city with a novel of 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.
“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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Famous for his expos of the Campagnian mafia (Gomorrah), Saviano now offers a novel to color in the outlines, conjuring one bravura personality and the violence he unleashes to gain a piece of the action in Naples. Fifteen-year-old Nicolas Fiorillo is the ruthless ringleader of his paranza, a gang that travels by motor scooter wresting control of concentric neighborhoods from rival gangs among the Camorra. Saviano chronicles the gang's ascent, from sidling up to middlemen to taking over their territory. The reader grows ever more appalled by the boys' increasingly unemotional acts of intimidation and their wanton stirring up of mayhem. Saviano makes clear that the gang's trajectory from selling hashish to target practice on immigrants would be impossible without Nicolas, whose Machiavellian behavior toward his family proves no less callous than it is toward his friends. Nicolas is willing to sacrifice people for power, and the denouement of the story is gut-wrenching proof that, for him, the end justifies the means. But the story suffers from too many unrealized characters, as well as the frustrating inclusion of both Italian and English dialogue next to one another in the text. This valiant novelization of an inhumane world is overcrowded and overlong.
