The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - 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's books include award-winning biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. He is also the author of 'The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj' and of several books on Spain and the Middle East. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, he is a contributor to the Spectator and the New York Review of Books. He is currently writing a book on Giuseppe Verdi and the unification of Italy.

The Last Leopard won the Marsh Biography Award in 1989.