Perfection - by Vincenzo Latronico (Paperback)

About the Book

"Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukèolln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin's twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak"--

Book Synopsis

A 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee

A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.

"One of Europe's most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we've all been waiting for." --Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist

Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life--and the life of Berlin itself--begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same."

Perfection--Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English--is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?

Review Quotes

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize

"Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation's "identical struggle for a different life" globalization, homogenization, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) "about" Berlin and the "creative professional" expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonized, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can't recommend it highly enough."
-- Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

"One of Europe's most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we've all been waiting for."
-- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist

"Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time--in a relationship, in a city--and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young--all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It's such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book."
--Sheila Heti

"An important novel, innovative in its own way."
-- Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know

"Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vicenzo Latronico is the finest of writers." --Lauren Groff

"With ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads, a class and subculture made possible by the innovations of American tech and media conglomerates and policymakers in Brussels." --Ryan Ruby, The New York Times Book Review

"Perfection is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences--all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction but which had, in this case, been obscured by proper nouns and mimetic precision." --Alice Gregory, The New Yorker

"Latronico's portrayal of his rootless and searching characters is frank and clear-eyed, revealing the limits of the idealism of their youth, when 'beauty and pleasure seem[ed] as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid.'" --Publishers Weekly

"Like Perec, Latronico is biting and withering, a funny critic of certain habits of mind and social conventions, which works especially well for the Berlin expat set, with its balance of radical hedonism (at the club Berghain and elsewhere) and middle-class, even technocratic careerism."
--Kevin Lozano, Washington Post

"A new master of Italian literature."
-- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

One need not look back a century for compelling depictions of Berlin. ...Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, [is] notable for [its] deromanticized renderings of the city. -- The Baffler

"This book gives startling form to the question of how to live a meaningful life; to the illusion that appearance is beauty; to the restlessness of contemporary society. I read it in a breath and I was captivated."-- Ayşegül Savaş

"Perfection is a generation-defining piece of literature, one that spares us nothing. To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you've helped create: the one that lurks behind the filters, algorithms and curated ephemera of selfhood that make up our public lives. Read it and tremble." -- Madeleine Watts

"The world of this horrifying novel has been built piece by perfect piece - honey-colored floorboards, a monstera's perforate leaves, glossy white tiles, a breakfast of assorted seeds, a game of Carcassonne - the method of its construction likewise perfect, a perfection of prose that ends by releasing, miraculously, the very thing perfection is made to prohibit, the heavy stink of mortality.'"
-- Kathryn Davis

"I recognize Anna and Tom in Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection because I am them. Never has a novel so incisively captured what it feels like to participate in the globalized culture of the Internet era: to consume it; to be overwhelmed by it; to try, futilely, to make it. The repeating symbols of homogenized good taste - potted house plants, reclaimed-wood furniture, post-industrial clubs - haunt the characters as their own poignant hopes to be original. I felt attacked, as they say online. Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy. By its end, the novel will cure you of any dream for authenticity." -- Kyle Chayka

"To even call this book a novel is to both overestimate and diminish it: it's more like an experimental long-read, or a hyper-intellectual piece of lifestyle journalism...precise, tight, trite, and heartless." --Nicholas Harris, The New Statesman

About the Author

Born in Rome, Vincenzo Latronico studied philosophy at the University of Milan and has since published numerous books in Italian, including The Conspiracy of Doves and Gymnastics and Revolution. In addition to his own writing, he has also translated the work of many writers into Italian including work by George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, and Alexander Dumas. He lives in Milan.

Sophie Hughes is a translator of Spanish and Italian literature. Her translation of The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2019, and her translation of Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the same prize. Her writing and translations have appeared in McSweeney's, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The White Review, Frieze and The New York Times. She lives in the United Kingdom.