Lampedusa, Steven Price
Lampedusa, Steven Price
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Lampedusa
A Novel

Author: Steven Price

Narrator: Jonathan Aris

Unabridged: 9 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/17/2019


Synopsis

"Combining a British accent with seamless Italian pronunciation, Jonathan Aris's slow and steady narration lends an appropriate tone of dignity and melancholy to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's account of a lifetime of memories and tragedies." - AudioFile Magazine

Like Colm Tóibín’s The Master or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a novel about art and writing in the life of one of the greats.

Set in a sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Steven Price’s Lampedusa explores the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi, the last prince of Lampedusa, as he struggles to complete his only novel, The Leopard.

In 1955, Tomasi was diagnosed with advanced emphysema; shortly after, he began work on a novel that would fail to be published before his death four years later. When The Leopard at last appeared, it won Italy’s Strega Prize and became the greatest Italian novel of the century.

Adhering intensely to the facts of Tomasi's life but moving deep into the mind of the author, Lampedusa inhabits the complicated interior of a man facing down the end of his life and struggling to make something of lasting worth while there is still time.

About Steven Price

Steven Price's first collection of poems, Anatomy of Keys (2006), won Canada's 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, was short-listed for the BC Poetry Prize, and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into That Darkness (2011), was short-listed for the 2012 BC Fiction Prize. His second collection of poems, Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), won the 2013 ReLit Award. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his family.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Katie on October 09, 2021

Very rarely there arrives a book I never want to finish. Lampedusa tells the story of the Italian writer at the end of his life. It's a deeply moving account of old age in a world that has dramatically changed. (He has lived through both world wars, fought in the first one.) Mostly set in Sicily whi......more

Goodreads review by Krista on September 17, 2019

The past seemed a great flowing passage through which his bloodline passed, back through the wastrel grandfathers and great-grandfathers, to the saints and holy men of the eighteenth century, to the legendary civic figures of the seventeenth and the royal granting of Lampedusa in 1667 and the fir......more

Goodreads review by Jin on November 21, 2020

Dieses Buch gehört zu denen, die schwierig sind in Worte zu fassen. Manchmal reicht es nicht eine Zusammenfassung der Handlung wiederzugeben; es geht um die Atmosphäre, die das Buch beim Erzählen kreiert, die faszinierend melancholisch und liebevoll über die letzten Jahre des letzten Geschlechts der......more

Goodreads review by Wendy on December 10, 2024

An absolute gem of a book. Set in the crumbling Palmero, Sicily in the 1950s, it chronicles the final years of the life of the last Prince of Lampedusa and the dying days of the Sicilian nobility. In his final years on this earth, the widely read Prince pens his first and only novel, the Leopard. Th......more

Goodreads review by Kansas on March 01, 2025

[URL not allowed] "He was a man who had left middle age at the way other men will exit a room, without a thought, as if he might go back at any moment. He was fifty-eight years old. A sadness crinkled his eyes, a shyness, evident even in boyhood photographs." Mientras leía "El G......more


Awards

  • Giller Prize - Nominee