Numero zero is the seventh novel by Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco and his final novel released during his lifetime. It was first published in January 2015; the English translation by Richard Dixon appeared in November 2015. It is a satire of the tabloid press, set in Italy in 1992.

The international bestseller

1945, Lake Comi. Mussolini and his mistress are captured by local partisans and shot in a summary execution. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy.

1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack, is offered a fee he can't refuse to ghost-write a memoir. His subject: a fledgeling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns the paranoid theories of Braggadocio who is convinced that Mussolini's corpse was a body-double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It's the scoop he desperately needs. The evidence? He's working on it.

Colonna is sceptical. But when a body is found, stabbed to death in a back alley, and the paper is shut down, even he is jolted out of his complacency.

Fuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, Love, corruption, and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of the cynical forces that have shaped Italy since the last days of World War II. This gripping story from the author of The Name of the Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.