Here are some of Sciascia's greatest stories - brief and haunting, the realist tradition at its best. In one tale a couple of men talk, cynically yet earnestly, about the etymology of the word 'mafia' - who they are, and why their interest is so piqued by the word, becomes apparent with frightening clarity. In another story a group of peasants are taken on board ship and promised that they will be put ashore illegally at Trenton, New Jersey; after a long time at sea, their landfall is far from what they expected. And Mussolini himself takes an interest in the case of Aleister Crowley, whose presence in Sicily has become an embarrassment.

Secret deals, powerful men and murder - One Way or Another is a chillingly prophetic work. The Knight and Death features a nameless (and apparently terminally ill) detective investigating the murder of a lawyer believed to have been killed by a mysterious revolutionary group. The detective thinks otherwise and sets out to prove that powerful business interests were involved, with the revolutionary group invented to cover up the real reasons behind the murder.

In the piazza, a man lies dead. No one will say if they witnessed his killing. This presents a challenge to the investigating officer, a man who earnestly believes in the values of a democratic and modern society. Indeed, his enquiries are soon blocked off by a wall of silence and vested interests; he must work against the community to save it and expose the truth.The narrative moves on two levels: that of the investigator, who reveals a chain of savage crimes; and that of the bystanders and watchers, of those complicit with secret power, whose gossipy, furtive conversations have only one end - to stop the truth coming out. This novel about the Mafia is also a mesmerizing demonstration of how that organization sustains itself. It is both a beautifully, tautly written story and a brave act of denunciation.

The expression 'Sicilian uncle' has the same sense in Italian as 'Dutch uncle' does in English, but with sinister overtones of betrayal and inconstancy. The four novellas in Sicilian Uncles, originally published in 1958, are political thrillers of a kind - the first fruits of Sciascia's maturity. In these stories, illusions about ideology and history are lost in mirth, suffering and abandoned innocence. Each novella has its historical moment: the Allied invasion of Sicily, the Spanish Civil War, the death of Stalin, the 'events' of 1848. These occasions and their consequences are registered in the lives of Sciascia's wonderfully drawn characters. Each has voice, wit and a private history which opens out onto the wider circumstances of his time.

District Attorney Varga is shot dead while picking a sprig of jasmine. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Is this string of murders an individual vendetta or a more sinister plot? The charming Inspector Rogas is determined to find out. The pursuit of truth and justice are Rogas's vocation, but his work is frustrated by a system which defies his understanding. He needs a key, a way in, a map, and he is sure that his chief suspect Cres can provide it... The book, written in 1971, uncannily prefigures the Red Brigade's subsequent killing of magistrates and the Catholic-Communist pact of the late 1970s in Italy. Developed under Sciascia's hand in the spirit of a parody, Equal Danger has come to be regarded as a wide-ranging political thriller, one of the masterpieces of the genre.

A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds himself up against an apparently unbreachable wall of silence. A surprise turn puts him on the track of a series of nasty crimes. But all the while Bellodi's investigation is being carefully monitored by a host of observers, near and far. They share a single concern: to keep the truth from coming out.
This short, beautifully paced novel is a mesmerizing description of the Mafia at work.

This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead.The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected--and tragic. "To Each His Own" is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia--a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

The owner of a construction company is shot twice and killed in the light of day on the piazza as he tries to catch a bus that is about to leave. The driver, passengers, and conductor deny having seen anything. In his most famous novel, which debuted in 1961, Sciascia describes the structure of the mafia for the first time - and this during a period when the public denied its existence - and expertly characterized its organization. In the series Law in Art - Art in Law (Recht in der Kunst - Kunst im Recht), edited by Thomas Vormbaum, Sciascia's classic tale is also analyzed by renowned observers: Gisela SchlA1/4ter provides literary commentary, Daniele Negri offers legal commentary.

This is a short, powerful novel dealing with the complicities and accomodations of power within Italian politics.

Leonardo Sciascia was an outstanding and controversial presence in twentieth-century Italian literary and intellectual life. Writing about his native Sicily and its culture of secrecy and suspicion, Sciascia matched sympathy with skepticism, unflinching intelligence with a streetfighter's intransigent poise. Sciascia was particularly admired for his short stories, and The Wine-Dark Sea offers what he considered his best work in the genre: thirteen spare and trenchant miniatures that range in subject from village idiots to mafia dons, marital spats to American dreams. Here, in unforgettable form, Sciascia examines the contradictions--sometimes comic, sometimes deadly, and sometimes both--of Sicily's turbulent history and day-to-day life.

From one of modern Italy's greatest writers come four flawless novellas that combine history and fiction while mapping the treacherous relations between individuals and the state. Whether set amid the paranoia of the fascist past or the criminal and political labyrinths of present-day Italy, these Kafkaesque novellas are thrillers of moral gravity, beautifully written and relentlessly engrossing.

On March 16, 1978 Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of Italy, was ambushed in Rome. Within three minutes the gang killed his escort and bundled Moro into one of three getaway cars. An hour later the terrorist group the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on March 18 they said he would be tried in a "people's court of justice." Seven weeks later Moro's body was discovered in the trunk of a car parked in the crowded center of Rome.
"The Moro Affair" presents a chilling picture of how a secretive government and a ruthless terrorist faction help to keep each other in business.
Also included in this book is "The Mystery of Majorana," Sciascia's fascinating investigation of the disappearance of a major Italian physicist during Mussolini's regime.

A boring afternoon in August, Mr. Manno, a pharmacist from a small Sicilian town, receives a threatening anonymous "die for what you did." Manno, without knowing what the note refers, the complaint brought hardship and forgotten the matter. But the day it was open season game, the pharmacist killed in the bush with another respectable villager, the doctor Roscio.

Bianchi is traveling to Sicily for the first time. In the train, he meets a typical family of the island: a couple, who wont stop talking or annoying the traveler, with their children, impudent and restless, and the young woman who travels with them, reserved, shy, but circumspect. Bianchi, attentive to the reality that unfolds before his eyes, sharply portrays Sicilian society and its contradictions.

The morning of March 10, 1926, a man who claims to suffer amnesia is arrested for stealing from a cemetery in Turin. After being declared a danger to himself and others, he enters the madhouse Collegno. Soon, La Domenica del Corriere newspaper publishes a photo of the forgetful under the headline "Does somebody know him?"

October 1st 1862, thirteen persons are stabbed at the same time in equidistant different points in the city of Palermo. Attorney Guido Giacosa is in charge of these multiple crimes investigation. He has just arrived in Sicilia after been appointed General Prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal. He's committed to find the true instigator. The first suspect to confess his guilt is Angel DAngelo, and others will follow; however, the mastermind is elusive and hard to catch.

En la Italia del siglo XVII, el tribunal de la Inquisicin condena a la hoguera a una sirvienta, Caterina Medici, acusada de brujera. Segn los testigos, con sus maleficios provoc que el dueo de la casa en que serva Caterina sufriera extraos dolores de estomago y que un amo anterior se enamorara perdidamente de ella. Esta ancdota, recogida por Alessandro Manzoni en Los novios, da pie a Leonardo Sciascia a reflexionar sobre uno de sus temas predilectos, la justicia. Y lo hace rastreando en las actas del proceso incoado a Caterina y en antiguos documentos, para contar de manera pormenorizada la vida de esta ?bruja confesa?: su matrimonio fallido, sus sucesivos trabajos, el abandono de sus hijos, los numerosos amantes y su ?comercio carnal con el diablo?, hasta que la fatalidad la puso en manos del Santo Oficio y la arrastr a un segundo y ms terrible calvario.