Empire of Pain

The shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis. The inspiration behind the Netflix series Painkiller, starring Uzo Aduba and Matthew Broderick. Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction The Sunday Times Bestseller A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' One of The Telegraph's 20 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 'There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page' - Sunday Times 'A page-turner with a villainous family to rival the Roys in Succession' - Esquire The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions like Harvard and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin. A blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis - an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and author of Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe, exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty, and twenty-first-century greed. 'This book will make your blood boil' - John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood 'I gobbled up Empire of Pain . . . a masterclass in compelling narrative nonfiction.' - Elizabeth Day, The Guardian 'You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much' - The Times

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (a collection of his New Yorker stories), and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times and now streaming as a limited series on Disney+), as well as two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York.