Empire of Pain

Winner of 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Longlisted for the 2021 FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
*A Barack Obama 2021 Summer reading list recommendation*

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, Oxycontin and the opioid crisis.

'Jaw-dropping . . . Beggars belief' – Sunday Times

'You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much' – The Times

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.