Foucault's Pendulum

Three editors at a small Milan publishing house, bored by the occult manuscripts that cross their desks, begin a game. They feed scraps of esoteric lore, from the Knights Templar to hidden conspiracies, into a computer and invent a grand plan that explains all of history. What begins as an intellectual joke slowly takes on a life of its own.

The novel is a dense, witty satire on conspiracy theories and the human hunger for secret patterns. It asks how far clever readers can be led by their own inventions.