Numero Zero

“Eco combines his delight in suspense with astute political satire in this brainy, funny, neatly lacerating thriller.” —Booklist 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, and murder. A clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II—from Mussolini to Berlusconi. Numero Zero is the work of a master storyteller. “Although Numero Zero takes place in 1992, Eco may as well be describing our current journalistic landscape of hot takes and click bait.” —Los Angeles Times “Readers of Elena Ferrante or Rachel Kushner will likely catch the barbs in [Eco’s] clever absurdities.” —Vulture