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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince with no literary reputation and no connections to any literary movement, wrote his only novel in the final years of his life, submitted it to publishers, and was rejected - most notably by Elio Vittorini, who favoured fiction with strong, positive messages and simply failed to see what he was holding. Lampedusa died in 1957 without knowing his book would be published at all, let alone that it would become one of the bestselling Italian novels of the twentieth century and a fixture of the world canon. That irony - a meditation on obsolescence, itself nearly rendered obsolete before it existed - hangs over every page.

The novel opens in Sicily in 1860, as Garibaldi's Redshirts land at Marsala and the Risorgimento crashes into the timeless, sun-baked world of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. Fabrizio is one of the great creations of modern fiction: a patriarch in the traditional mould but more intellectual than his peers, an amateur astronomer who finds more order in the stars than in the collapsing social arrangements around him. He is flawed but wise, proud but painfully aware of the world slipping through his fingers. When his beloved nephew Tancredi joins Garibaldi's forces, Fabrizio is flexible enough to see the advantage in it, even endorsing Tancredi's marriage to Angelica, the ravishing daughter of an uncouth but ascendant member of the new liberal bourgeoisie. Tancredi supplies the novel's most famous line, the one that has entered political vocabulary far beyond Italy: if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

What makes the book extraordinary is not its plot, which is slender, but its texture. The arid Sicilian landscapes, the decaying opulence of the palazzi, the sweltering heat, the voluptuous excess of the food and the ballrooms - all of it is rendered with a sensuous precision that makes the island itself feel like the novel's second protagonist. The characterisation extends well beyond Fabrizio. Father Pirrone, the household Jesuit, devout and precise and regularly humiliated; Fabrizio's brittle wife and daughters; the social ties of the old order and their psychological underpinnings - everyone is drawn with shrewd, often ironic sympathy. The humour is easy to miss on a first pass but it is there, dry and constant, undercutting any temptation toward simple nostalgia.

The book is not without genuine difficulties, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The pace, particularly in the opening chapters, can drag as Lampedusa lingers over descriptive passages and philosophical rumination. There is a recurring tendency to sink deep into mundane daily rituals, so that for every breathtaking scene of political intrigue there is a stretch that some will find slow-moving and tediously detailed. The structure is episodic rather than continuous - the novel spans 1860 to 1910 in discrete chapters, with significant deaths and developments occurring offstage between sections - and readers who want a definitive resolution to Fabrizio's arc will not entirely get one. The final chapter, set decades later among Fabrizio's elderly daughters and concerned with false relics and a taxidermied dog, strikes some as an anticlimax and others as the most devastating thing in the book. I lean toward the latter, but the divide is real.

It is worth remembering that the novel's early reception was genuinely hostile in certain quarters. Catholics disapproved of its pessimism, Sicilian apologists resented its portrait of the island, Marxist historians attacked what they took to be its view of history, and Italy's postwar intelligentsia found its beautiful prose and well-drawn characters insufficiently committed, progressive, or experimental. The book became a bestseller anyway, perhaps partly because of the savaging. Those objections have aged poorly; the novel has not.

What lingers is the elegiac force of the thing - the quiet sadness of change, the fall of old traditions, the recognition that even the most powerful must face the reality of fading away. The scene of Fabrizio contemplating ruin at Donnafugata is haunting, and the chapter recounting his death is among the most memorable depictions of dying in literature. This is a book about loss written by a dying man in a bombed-out aftermath, and you feel it. Read it slowly, in summer if you can. It rewards patience precisely because patience - the long view, the cosmic indifference of the stars - is its whole subject.