The Day of the Owl

The Day of the Owl is a crime novel by the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, completed in 1960 and published in Italian the following year under the title Il giorno della civetta, drawing inspiration from the January 1947 assassination of the Sicilian trade unionist Accursio Miraglia. Set in Sicily, the novel follows Captain Bellodi, a Carabinieri officer from northern Italy, as he investigates a murder and runs into the wall of silence, omerta, that protects the island's organized crime networks, and it is widely credited as the first work of fiction for a mainstream readership to openly name and depict the Mafia as a criminal organization at a time when many Italians still disputed its existence. The novel won the Crotone Prize in 1962, achieved immediate commercial and critical success, and established Sciascia's reputation as a defining literary chronicler of Sicilian organized crime.