The last leopard : a life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of "The Leopard", one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. "The Leopard" describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory.

But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality.

Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.