Perfection

They have everything to make them happy. Expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment. Young, cool digital creatives, they enjoy slow cooking, Danish furniture, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene.

It's exactly the life they had imagined for themselves. But they begin to feel disillusioned, bored. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move away, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism proves fruitless, since their direct action amounts to taking an Uber only if it is snowing, tipping in cash, never eating tuna.

Trapped in a lifestyle optimised for digital perfection, yearning for authenticity, they find themselves doing something they could never have predicted.

Vincenzo Latronico's stylistic mastery, wit and wry humour make Perfection a brilliant novel about contemporary life.

Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and lived for a number of years in Berlin. He is an art critic and has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English. He lives in Milan.

Sophie Hughes has translated Spanish and Latin American authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zeran and Enrique Vila-Matas. She was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019 and 2020, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofia Translation Prize. Perfection is her first translation from Italian.

'Sharp and revelatory. Latronico demonstrates that, despite their vanity, his characters Anna and Tom are not so different from others whose lives are conditioned by the consumer economy—they want what others want: a life that is legible to them yet not prescribed. Latronico is a brilliant and fearless writer. I recommend this novel to every reader I meet.' Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries