HATE

The journalists who today accuse Marco De Sanctis over an old story have no idea how truly adventurous his life has been since the day—years earlier—he struck up a friendship with an eccentric digital entrepreneur who would later become his mentor. They do not know the details of the ride that carried him from the provinces to the heart of an end-of-empire Rome, amid opulent palaces and seagulls rummaging through trash; a dramatic, funny, and paradoxical journey behind the scenes of power and the media, during which Marco found and lost love and was forced to reinvent himself from scratch, accepting that ours is the age of technology—until he founded Before, a Big Data company capable of predicting the behavior of millions of consumers.

The journalists do not even know that at the center of Marco De Sanctis’s thoughts now—more than the accusations and suspicions—is the device he is about to launch on the market, and its ability to reveal the dark heart of human beings. They do not know this because they cannot read Hate, his unexpected and shocking confession.

Daniele Rielli confirms his ability to unite comedy and tragedy, to create deep and iconoclastic characters and to accompany them with an analysis of the forces shaping our time, from social hatred and digital surveillance to the reemergence of the Scapegoat. Hate is a work in which it is easy to recognize the twilight of the West we inhabit every day; the consequences awaiting us just beyond the horizon, however, are those we do not dare to imagine—even though they have been hiding within each of us since the dawn of time.