On 11 April 1987 the Italian writer Primo Levi fell to his death in the house where he was born. More than forty years after his rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, it now seemed that Levi had committed suicide. Levi's account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, is recognised as one of the essential books of mankind. No other work interrogates our recent moral history so incisively or conveys more profoundly the horror of the Nazi genocide. Ian Thomson spent over ten years in Italy and elsewhere researching and writing this rich and definitive biography. New light is shed on Levi's recurring depressions and vital information is unearthed regarding the writer's premature death. This matchless book unravels the strands of a life caught between the factory and the typewriter, family and friends.