The Benedictine whisked a brush of multicoloured feathers over the top of the book, puffed out his plump cheeks like the god of winds in an old nautical map, blew black dust from the leather cover, and, with a shiver of what in the circumstances seemed delicate trepidation, laid the volume open on the table.
Palermo, 1783: The barons pursue feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And the porcine abbot Vella, eager to curry favour with Naples, 'invents' an ancient Arabic chronicle, The Council of Egypt, that rewrites Sicilian history.
Head of Zeus, an Apollo Library book * Fiction
01 Dec 2016 * 224pp * £6.99 * 9781784978020
REVIEWS
'During the last quarter century, Sciascia has made out of his curious Sicilian experience a literature that is not quite like anything else ever done by a European'
Gore Vidal
Author
Leonardo Sciascia
Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1983) was a novelist and politician whose works were often set in his troubled, mafia-blighted homeland of Sicily. He hailed from Racalmuto in the south-west of the island and lived there for much of his life.
Introduction
Michael Schmidt is the founder of Carcanet Press and the general editor of PN Review. He was until recently Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow. He has also been Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge.
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