The island from the previous day

After Umberto Eco brought the Middle Ages to life in his world success 'The Name of the Rose', he now leads us masterfully into the seventeenth century, the era of the baroque, of intrigues and machinations disguised by politeness and gallantry. The era also in which the first modern scientific discoveries still went hand in hand with the fantasy and speculations of earlier centuries, in which learned treatises were hardly distinguishable from novels, and inventors were guided more by what should be possible than by what was possible.
In 'The Island of the Day Before' the hand of the master Umberto Eco is unmistakably present. It is a gripping adventure novel, a cross between Robinson Crusoe, Mutiny on the Bounty and The Three Musketeers, full of unrequited love and jealousy, setbacks and rescue, espionage and suspense. And Eco would not be Eco if he had not succeeded in an inimitable way in situating this adventure novel in the overwhelming historical setting of seventeenth-century Europe.