The protagonist of the story is an extremely cynical man named Simone Simonini. After losing both his parents, he is raised by his orthodox and regressive grandfather, a man with an innate hatred for Jewish people.

Simone grows up and begins to study law, and is soon hired by a corrupt lawyer, under whom he gets adept at the art of forgery.The Piedmont Government secret service soon absorb him and he is sent to Palermo as an undercover spy during the invasion of Italy by Giuseppe Garibaldi.

He meets influential people like Alexander Dumas and Italian patriots like Ippolito Nievo and Nino Bixio. Soon, he is ordered to destroy a few arcane and highly secured documents that Nievo possesses, and in an attempt to do so he manages to annihilate the ship on which Nievo is sailing, resulting in numerous casualties. This decision leads to him being dispelled to Paris.

In Paris, he sets up a small forgery business and works alongside with the French secret service as a document fixer and forger. He dedicates the next thirty five years of his life to doing this, and passes along intelligence during the Paris Commune days. With an ardent desire to retire on a decent pension, he plans to forge one last document, a document that came to be known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a supposed proof of Jews wanting world domination. The bulk of the novel is in the form of diary entries by Simone in 1897. The Prague Cemetery was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012, and is considered to be the authors second best novel.

About Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco, born in 1932, is an Italian philosopher, author and semiotician.
He has authored novels like The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Absent Structure, and The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.

Born in Alessandria in Italy, he studied literature and medieval philosophy at the University of Turin. He was employed as the cultural editor for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), the state broadcasting station and also served as a lecturer at the University of Turin. Eco is an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He is married to Renate Ramge, and the couple have two children together. He splits his time between his Milan apartment and a vacation home near Urbino.