'On Beauty' is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.
'Could Cognetti be the new Elena Ferrante?' Bookseller The international sensation that spent a year on the Italian bestseller list about two young boys who meet in the mountains every summer, and the men they grow up to become 'ENCHANTING' Guardian 'BRILLIANT' New York Times 'ABSORBING' Irish Times Pietro, a lonely city boy, spends his summers in a secluded valley in the Alps. There, surrounded by meadows and peaks, he begins to learn of his father's dreams and passions. There, too, he meets Bruno, the son of a local stonemason. As the pair run wild, they form a once-in-a-lifetime friendship. Then one year, the summer visits stop. Pietro is drawn to cities around the world. But the memory of the mountains never leaves him and, after his father dies, he returns in search of the freedom and camaraderie that he once knew. 'Exquisite... A rich, achingly painful story' ANNIE PROULX Winner of the 2017 Strega Prize, the Strega Giovani Prize and the Prix Medicis etranger
"The Prague Cemetery" is the latest international bestseller from Umberto Eco, author of "The Name of the Rose." Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with political and religious conspiracies from Turin to Prague to Paris. What if, behind it all, lay one lone man determining the fate of the Continent?
From the author of international bestseller The Eight Mountains comes a story of love and community in the wild beauty of the Italian AlpsThe remote alpine village of Fontana Fredda lives by the seasons. These quiet, complex rhythms appeal to Fausto, who has left the city of Milan behind, and with it his relationship. He takes a job as chef in a little restaurant and entrusts himself to new beginnings.Silvia is also seeking change: her sights are on the glaciers where, she has read, climbing a thousand metres towards the sky is equivalent to travelling ten times the same distance to the north. She is in search of her personal North Pole.When Fausto and Silvia meet one night, their story begins: a tender story of love and renewal; of the community that sustains them; and of lives humbled by the implacable strength and beauty of the mountains.As intimate in focus as it is epic in scope, The Lovers is a luminous meditation on our quest to understand our place in one another's lives, and in the magnificence of the world around us.Praise for The Eight Mountains:'Exquisite... A rich, achingly painful story' Annie Proulx'Enchanting' Guardian'Brilliant' New York Times
A student of philosophy in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together, with Belbo's colleague Distallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars - only to discover too late that the Plan they have invented is in fact real. As brilliant and quirky as his Name of the rose, this book (not a novel in the strict sense of the word) is full of puns, allusions and literary references and "information" playfully and masterly manipulated by Eco