“If you want to be a writer,” Sciascia declared, “you need to grow up in a house full of women.” The three aunts dominating his childhood were devoted readers of Montaigne.

In that “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” category which attaches to candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Leonardo Sciascia was a front-runner. He should have won it for his integrity, fearless ness and indomitable sense of purpose as a writer, yet he never quite made it to Stockholm. His following among anglophone readers has always been what might be called “select”. Novels like The Day of the Owl, To Each His Own and Equal Danger, having found their translators, came and went with appropriate critical cap-doffing, but Sciascia’s place remains firmly among the illustrious underappreciated.

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