Perfection

A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.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 & 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, & Anna & Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work & 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?°°°Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 & currently lives in Berlin. He is an art critic & has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, & Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English.Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, & Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. She lives in Trieste.