Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month for March 2022

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2021

Shortlisted for The British Book Awards 2022 Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2022

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium and Oxycontin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions - Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. 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, Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of 21st century greed.