In the spirit of Colm Tóibín's The Master, and Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Lampedusa is a novel about art and life, of loss and survival, imagining how one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century came to be written.
Shortlisted for the Giller Prize
In the Sicily of the 1950s, still haunted by memories of Fascism and the war, the last prince of Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi, struggles to complete his only novel, The Leopard.
Tomasi is a veteran of the previous war, while his wife Alessandra is living in exile after her native Latvia is absorbed into the Soviet Union. The childless couple are survivors of a vanishing world of European aristocracy, living in the present, yet nostalgic for the decadent past. Tomasi is diagnosed with advanced emphysema in 1955 and with a profound awareness of his doomed lineage, he begins working on a novel. When The Leopard is posthumously published, it is to much acclaim. Tomasi's legacy is awarded Italy's Strega Prize and considered the greatest Italian novel of the century.
In Lampedusa, Steven Price inhabits the heart of a man facing the end of his life and struggling to make something of lasting worth while there is still time. Achingly haunting and beautifully conceived, this is the story of one man's awakening to the possibilities of life as he nears his demise.
'In subtle and intelligent prose, Price invites us into the mind of a man striving to make sense of memory and mortality.' Sunday Times
