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. Diagnosed with advanced emphysema and with a profound awareness of his doomed lineage, the prince begins working on a novel. When The Leopard is posthumously published, it is to much acclaim; it will come to be considered the greatest Italian novel of the century.Achingly haunting, Lampedusa tells the story of a man’s awakening to the possibilities of life as he nears its end.