'There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it'
- Rick Stein
'Every once in a while, like certain golden moments of happiness, infinitely memorable, one stumbles on a book or a writer, and the impact is like an indelible mark. Lampedusa's The Leopard, his only novel, and a masterpiece, is such a work'
- Independent
'Perhaps the greatest novel of the century'
- L.P. Hartley
'One of the great lonely books...not a historical novel, but a novel which happens to take place in history'
- E.M. Forster
'The poetry of Lampedusa's novel flows into the Sicilian countryside...a work of great artistry'
- Peter Ackroyd