Island of the Day Before

The year is 1643. Roberto, a young nobleman, survives war, the Bastille, exile and shipwreck as he voyages to a Pacific island straddling the date meridian. There he waits now, alone on the mysteriously deserted Daphne, separated by treacherous reefs from the island beyond: the island of the day before. If he could read it, time - and his misfortunes - might be reversed. But first he must learn to swim...Thrillingly plotted, engrossing, funny and moving, The Island of the Day Before is Umberto Eco's finest novel to date.'Every age gets the classics it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before... This novel belongs in the great tradition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide. We are left energized, exhilarated by the sheer sensory excitement of the music's telling'New York Times Book ReviewNo comparable book has ever existed...the exuberance of the narrative and the sheer sumptuousness of the language possess a precision for which everything in Eco's earlier writing had prepared us, but equally a panache for which nothing had' Sunday Times'Vintage Eco... full of verbal conjuring: both an enjoyable fable and a skilful parade of recent literary theory and history of science' The Times'A great feast of words' Times Literary Supplement