Press

What the critics say

[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

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
- Times Literary Supplement

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder… chilling
- Daily Telegraph