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 is an Italian novelist, translator and art critic. He was born in Rome and currently lives in Milan. 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. His writing has appeared in frieze, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa and he is a regular contributor to Internazionale. Perfection is his fourth novel, his first to be translated into English. It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Born in Surrey, Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian. She is the translator of more than 20 novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zeran and Enrique Vila-Matas. Hughes has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclan Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofia Translation Prize. Her translations have been longlisted or shortlisted for the International Booker Prize five times, most recently her translation of Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection (shortlisted in 2025). Perfection has also been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Sophie Hughes lives in Trieste.
'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
