The Italian author’s latest novel, out in English in November, is about Mussolini, ‘media hoaxes, gossip and murder’

Umberto Eco, the Italian author of the modern classics The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, will publish a new novel in English at the end of this year.

Already out in Italy, where it went to the top of the charts, the translation of Eco’s Numero Zero will be released by publisher Harvill Secker on 5 November. The novel links two stories: one about the shooting of Mussolini and his mistress at Lake Como in 1945, and one about a hack writer named Colonna in 1992 Milan.

Colonna agrees to ghostwrite a memoir about a journalist working at a paper that is financed by a media magnate. Eco’s publisher said: “He learns the paranoid theories of the editor, who is convinced that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider fascist plot. It’s the scoop the paper desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it.”

The most recent novel from Eco, described as a “master storyteller” by his publisher, was 2011’s The Prague Cemetery, which was set in 19th-century Europe. It was shortlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize and sold more than 150,000 copies in English. Eco has also published an essay collection, Inventing the Enemy, and a “conversation” with Jean-Claude Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book.

In its description of the novel, Harvill Secker said Numero Zero is “fuelled by media hoaxes, mafiosi, love, gossip and murder”, and “reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy” since the second world war.