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