The Prague Cemetery cover art

The Prague Cemetery

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Prague Cemetery

By: Umberto Eco
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. 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. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?

©2011 Umberto Eco (P)2012 Isis Publishing Ltd, published in the UK by Random House Audiobooks Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Crime Middle Ages Italy

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Baudolino cover art
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods cover art
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana cover art
The Holy Thief cover art
The Secret History of Costaguana cover art
The Insider cover art
Monsieur le Commandant cover art
Don Quixote cover art
Roadside Picnic cover art
The Verge cover art
Shardlake: The Complete BBC Radio Collection cover art
My Name Is Nobody cover art
The Magic Mountain cover art
The Last Manchu cover art
The Traitors cover art
The House of Government cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Although a little heavy in places due to its unrelentingly grim theme; its dark humour, intelligence and relevance to todays issues of media and political manipulation, scapegoating and state power make it a worthwhile read. Umberto Ecco's literary style and insight are unbeatable.

Prague Cemetery - Umberto Ecco razor sharp

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book claims that, with one exception, all the characters actually existed in real life. My grasp of European history is not wide enough to know whether this is true but I certainly recognised a lot of people.

However, that aside, Umberto Eco is a fantastic storyteller and this book is one tall story set against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in recent times. His central character is Simonini, who tells us his story from a room in Paris where he has chosen to lock himself up and travel back over his life. This takes us to Italy and Prague, to the Paris Commune and beyond to the Dreyfus case. We meet with Freemasons, secret agents, Jews, priests, revolutionaries and all sorts in between.

I often feel that Umberto Eco makes stories complicated just for the sake of it and there are points in this story where you wish he would just get on with it. But this is a minor criticism of a fun read.

The narrator adds to the enjoyment, capturing different voices and the excitement of discovery.

A thrilling romp

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sean Barrett delivers an array of characters in an epic reading of a book set in an exotic context but so very revealing of our current political and cultural machinations being mostly out of our own hands..

Incredible book. Exquisitely read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Taking up the challenge of having read and enjoyed La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana and taking serious enjoyment from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods oI have to say initially that I absolutely loved Eco’s words of fiction.

Like some of the reviewers, I felt a little bit queasy about some of the language used in the novel towards the fictional targets of the fictional polemic. Lots of easy assumptions and old lies roll off the same pen as the wonderful lists and insights into a whole range of historical events. Like Queen Loana this is a children’s compendium of lots of old characters, narratives, ideas, fears and laughs rolled up into a huge ball of a book.

Everyone gets it and the underpinning hookum, that the world is run by the religious is still all too pervasive in our day to day secular lives. We all search for meaning and connections and where there are none we’re happy to see them in whatever nonsense we are fed. This is nonsense - troubling and distasteful at times, but nonetheless nonsense of the highest order. What next for Eco - the Nobel Laureateship? Well maybe if he were to write something a little more conciliatory to those dark figures standing in the shadowy corridors where such decisions are made behind closed, locked doors.

A wonderful book.

Universal gullibility....

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A convoluted and at times weird tale but such skilful writing and narration makes it easy to listen to

Umberto Eco’s genius

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews