The Last Leopard - Couverture souple

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, the last member of a great Sicilian family, died childless, impoverished and unknown, leaving behind him a recently completed manuscript of a novel. The following year that novel, The Leopard, was published to great acclaim and is now recognised as one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction. For a quarter of a century Italian and foreign scholars were denied access to the reclusive writer's papers until, following a meeting with Lampedusa's adopted son, David Gilmour succeeded in gaining permission to work in the writer's last home in Sicily. There, and in the nearby ruin of the Palazzo Lampedusa, he found many letters, diaries, notebooks and photographs which had not seen the light of day since Lampedusa's death. In The Last Leopard, David Gilmour brings to life not only an enigmatic writer of genius, but the slow, careful distillation of an undoubted masterpiece.

DAVID GILMOUR was born in 1952 and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history. His books include Lebanon: The Fractured Country (1983), The Transformation of Spain (1985) and Curzon (1994), which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. Gilmour's articles on Sicily, Lampedusa and many other subjects have appeared in the London Review of Books, Corriere della Sera, The Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. He now lives in Edinburgh.