Numero Zero

Umberto Eco

Nov 2015 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

The worldwide bestselling novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder from the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery ¶ #1 bestseller in Italy ¶ 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor’s paranoid theory that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It’s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it. It’s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, murder—and clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II, from Mussolini to Berlusconi, that will keep readers turning the pages as the novel’s thrilling plot unfolds.

About the author

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose, The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government; and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.