2025 International Booker Shortlisted Vincenzo Latronico for Perfection

'Perfection is a short, sly, scathing satire about dissatisfied millennials.... Latronico has written one of the most brilliantly controlled works of social realism I've read in a while.' Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times

This spring, we invite the 2025 International Booker Prize shortlistee Vincenzo Latronico to speak on Perfection, his first novel translated into English.

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene - an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.

Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and currently lives 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.