Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Buy the book: blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Perfection-by-Vincenzo-Latronico-author-Sophie-Hughes-translator/9781804271049
Buy tickets for our event with Vincenzo in Manchester: eventbrite.co.uk/e/perfection-vincenzo-latronico-in-conversation-with-jess-white-tickets-1144297357199
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Blackwell's Fiction Book of the Month - February 2025
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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?
Buy the book: blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Perfection-by-Vincenzo-Latronico-author-Sophie-Hughes-translator/9781804271049
Buy tickets for our event with Vincenzo in Manchester: eventbrite.co.uk/e/perfection-vincenzo-latronico-in-conversation-with-jess-white-tickets-1144297357199
___________________________________________
Blackwell's Fiction Book of the Month - February 2025
___________________________________________
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?
