Numero Zero

About this book

"A novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder."-- 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 here: 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. --From book jacket.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Umberto Eco

5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016

Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is widely known for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, topped the bestseller charts in Italy. Eco also wrote academic texts, children's books, and essays, and edited and translated into Italian boo…