The black market

Naples is ‘certainly the most disgusting place in Europe’, judged John Ruskin. The boisterous yelling in the corridor-like streets and beetling humanity filled the Victorian sage with loathing. (‘See Naples and die’ became for Ruskin ‘See Naples and run away’.) In the city’s obscure exuberance of life he could see only a great sleaze. Naples still has a bad name. Tourists tend to hurry on through to visit the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or jet-set Capri, renowned for the debauched excesses of Tiberius. Naples may lack the monumental grandeur of Rome, but visiting it constituted the gracious end to the Grand Tour during the 17th and 18th centuries.

A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1992. Croatia’s transition to capitalism inspired his 2007 novel Our Man in Iraq. Now No-Signal Area explores the search for meaning in a supposedly post-ideological world. Set in a fictitious town in a war-ravaged nation somewhere ‘between the East and the West’, it tells of two entrepreneurial cousins, Nikola and Oleg, who reopen a communist-era factory in order to produce an obsolete turbine from the 1980s, with the intention of selling it on the black market to an Arab dictator. They gain the trust of the workers