Umberto Eco

Richard Dixon

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How to Spot a Fascist

On the Shoulders of Giants

Chronicles of a Liquid Society

Numero Zero

Inventing the Enemy

A conversation curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

This is Not the End of the Book

The Name of the Rose

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The Count of Monte Cristo

Hot Wars and Media Populism

Turning Back The Clock

The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

On Literature

Baudolino

Five Moral Pieces

Foucault's Pendulum

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How To Travel With A Salmon

Kant And The Platypus

Island of the Day Before

Faith in Fakes

The Prague Cemetery

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[This] magnificent new novel... marks a return to the heady mixture of absorbing ideas and down-and-dirty historical detail that made The Name of the Rose such an international bestseller in the 1980's

This is a great mystery novel about paranoia, prejudice and forgery... We gain access to a world of city streets, strange anecdotes, gourmet menus, and conspiratorial minds... Eco’s best novel since The Name of the Rose

A smartly entertaining fin-de-siècle romp

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder and gourmadising... The great trick Eco pulls off here is to combine the most chilling of ideas - the origin of a hoax that led to genocide - with, elsewhere in the novel, an often funny lightness of touch... In other hands, this novel could have been grim.  But you end up feeling, despite all the darkness, that Eco is one of literature's great optimists

Imagine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco

Erudite and pop, sinister and passionate... A work destined to become a classic

The Prague Cemetery, snakes along an underground trail that twists through the enlightened heresies and bigoted gospels respectively propagated by Freemasons and Illuminati, Jesuits and Jew-baiters, before hinting at an ideological conspiracy that underlines the deceits of contemporary politics

Perhaps history's first and biggest conspiracy theory

Aided by a translation (from Richard Dixon) that tucks into Eco’s rich period pastiche with relish, the story weaves a fictional master of mischief into actual events… Highly enjoyable in its cunning twists

Has latterly been dubbed the thinking person's Da Vinci Code. But Eco is at home in history in a way that Dan Brown is not... Eco has a sure grasp not only of historical fact but of a period's literature. He's a dab hand at intertextuality... His intent in exposing the moment that lies at the origin of modern anti-Semitism seems to be to show how fictions can have factual consequences. Contemporary spin-doctors take note. Lies, particularly if they follow the pattern of paranoid conspiracies and create an enemy, can have dire effects... Eco is a comic master and, in his 80th year, his irreverent intelligence, if not always his plotting or scabrous taste, remains bracing

There is a great deal of pleasure to be taken in the games Eco plays and in the serious thinking about history and stories that lies beneath them

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder… chilling

Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with conspiracy both ghastly and mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. 
 
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, lies just one man?

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 
 
 'Eco's most accessible novel since The Name of the Rose, a temptingly complex tale of 19th-century plots and conspiracies' - Sunday Times

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

The Prague Cemetery

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Umberto Eco

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