Umberto Eco's biggest book since The Name of the Rose - a brilliant historical novel, which has already sold over a million copies in Europe
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.
[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
*Sunday Times*
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
*Independent*
A smartly entertaining fin-de-siècle romp
*Independent*
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
*Daily Telegraph*
Imagine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco
*Observer*
Erudite and pop, sinister and passionate... A work destined to
become a classic
*La Repubblica*
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
*Observer*
Perhaps history's first and biggest conspiracy theory
*Daily Mail*
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
*Independent*
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
*Independent*
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