Umberto Eco’s next novel is coming to America
A new novel from Umberto Eco, “Numero Zero,” will be coming to American bookstores this year. Longtime publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will release the novel in the fall.
Bruce Nichols, general interest publisher at HMH, describes the book as a “feverish and delightfully readable tale of a ghostwriter in Milan whose work pulls him into an underworld of media, politics and murderous conspiracies (involving the cadaver of Mussolini’s double, naturally). This novel is vintage Eco—corrupt newspapers, clandestine plots, imaginary histories.”
Eco is the 83-year-old Italian novelist best known for the international bestseller “The Name of the Rose,” published in 1980. The murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.
His other books include the novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” and literary criticism, including “On Ugliness” and “The Book of Lists.”
“Numero Zero,” which is already an Italian bestseller, is set in 1992. In 2008, Eco told the Paris Review, “The historical novel for me is not so much a fictionalized version of real events as a fiction that will actually enable us to better understand the real history.”
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