While many famous writers – Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde – are buried at Paris's Père Lachaise Cemetery, "there are also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who have been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited."

In eight chapters, the inimitable Anthony Daniels dilates on some forgotten writers of Père Lachaise, exploring their literary merit and the amusing byways of history, aiming "to entertain while illustrating the inexhaustible depth of our past."