Based on the life of the author’s great-grandfather, The Leopard tells of proud Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (in Sicily), during the time of the Risorgimento, or the movement for unification in the 1860s. A man of great appetites, Fabrizio moves through a time where he is the head of his family and a natural leader of the Sicilian people. The chapters of this delightful novel each take place during a specified time period—the first four cover 1860 and the last four cover the next 20 years. The events of the book tell the story of a changing Sicily. Fabrizio knows not only that he’s an aging Prince, but also that he represents a dying era.

Written over the course of 25 years and only published after death, di Lampedusa understands the delicacies of human conversation. He also gets at the heart of man, proud by nature yet one who appreciates the subleties of life. Packed with details of late 19th century Italian life, The Leopard paints a wistful portrait of family whose fortune change even while they try to maintain the status quo. A delicious read, I found di Lampedusa’s novel difficult to put down.

Readers may be aware of my growing fondness for Rupert Thomson after I read his excellent Divided Kingdom last year. I vowed to make my way through his previous books. So far I’ve read The Insult and The Book of Revelations. Soft makes my fourth Thomson novel. I’d say that this is not his best work, but interesting nonetheless. One of the things I appreciate about Thomson the most is that each book is different. His plots differ radically.

Soft tells the story of three different characters with intertwined fates revolving around a new soft drink. In the first section, we meet Barker Dodds, former night club and barber. After some unpleasantness with a local family that thinks he killed one of their family members, he flees Plymouth for London, where he ends up with a job as a barber, but not before making friends with an unsavory character. Dodds can’t escape his violent past—and he knows it. Eventually he accepts a “job” before he even knows what it is, to kill a woman named Glade Spencer.

The next section follows Glade and tells the story of why Dodds must kill her. She’s an artist/waitress with an American boyfriend. Glade never seems connected with the real world, almost like an observer rather than a participant. When her boyfriend Tom invites her to a wedding in New Orleans, she accepts and then has to scrounge up money to buy a dress. Little does she know that by agreeing to participate in a sleep study, her life would change forever.

Then we move on to the third character, an ad executive named Jimmy Lynch. He finds himself the protege of his new American boss, who was brought in as a hired gun. Jimmy’s new ad campaign for Kwench! sets the whole plot in motion.

Glade, Dodds, and Jimmy’s stories come together in the last two sections of the book, though Jimmy never meets Dodds or Glade face to face. Thomson obviously means Soft to be a comment on consumer culture, yet it’s also a mystery. Even with such finely developed characters, the plot seems improbable, but I still found myself reading it eagerly.