An extract from Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
A taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure
A taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure
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 24-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.
Perfection was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, announced on April 8 2025.
Vincenzo Latronico
About the Author
Vincenzo Latronico is an Italian novelist, translator and art critic
Sophie Hughes
About the Translator
Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian, and is the most nominated translator in the International Booker Prize’s 10-year historyJamie Demetriou reads from Perfection
An astute, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations
— The 2025 judges on Perfection
What the judges said
‘An astute, discomfiting, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations, following an expat couple in Berlin. Tom and Anna are defined by their material lives, working their way through a tick-list of clichés readers will recognise in themselves and experience as a dig in the ribs. Compassionate as well as cynical, the book – in an exquisite, precise and perfectly executed translation from Italian by Sophie Hughes – holds up a mirror up to the way so many people aspire to and are let down by today’s off-the-shelf measures of success. A startlingly refreshing read.’
What the critics said
Thomas McMullan, The Guardian
‘Yet Perfection transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico’s sociological observations. This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings. Anna and Tom’s actions, plainly stated, devastatingly illustrate a homogenisation shown to colonise minds and bodies as much as cities.’
Billie Walker, The Big Issue
‘Latronico’s first novel to be translated into English by Sophie Hughes, Perfection goes beyond the easy comparison of a curated online image and the reality beyond the screen. Through the couple whose world as they know it would surely end without a stable wi-fi connection, we see a deeper problem with a curated lifestyle. Over the decades of Anna and Tom’s relationship, the internet morphs the landscape, changing Lisbon and Berlin from cities with distinct cultural identities to the interchangeable global style that feels like home for the remote workers of the world. This is a compulsive read that demonstrates the new global aesthetic that has shaped our lives.’
Rachel Connolly, The Telegraph
‘The appeal of writing like this, as far as I understand it, is that it’s easy to read, yet endowed with a veneer of erudition and sophistication. What could speak more to the millennial sensibility than that? Maybe it’s too much to expect us to read a formally experimental novel that hits closer to home. But I found myself craving a bolder execution, in both content and style – not something this safe. I won’t spoil the ending of Perfection. Suffice it to say that, appropriately, it involves one of the other great millennial deities: inheritance.’
Alice Gregory, The New Yorker
‘Latronico’s conceit is clever and will delight anyone familiar with his source material, but his execution is ingenious … His novel’s agility in English owes much to its talented translator, Sophie Hughes.’
Kevin Lozano, The Washington Post
‘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 … What’s notable about Latronico’s experiment is that by borrowing Perec’s mode of caricature — exporting it into the present — he shows something universal about generations and their anxieties.’
Vincenzo Latronico on Perfection
‘I had tried for years to find a way to tell a story set at the intersection between our physical and our digital lives – how the two shape each other and our inner horizon. But it never worked – there is something about the way time spent online vanishes, about the simultaneity of it all, that seemed to resist any linear plot. Then I read Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties – which is about how consumerism changed a couple’s inner horizon – and immediately started annotating how it would play out today. The analogies seemed to write themselves. So I tried rewriting it, initially very closely, then taking some liberties along the way until it became a novel in itself.’
Read the full interview here.
Sophie Hughes on Perfection
‘It helped a lot that, despite not having met Vincenzo in person, I got to work closely with him. He’s an experienced literary translator himself, and instinctively understood what sort of input might be useful. Because the prose is quite stylised, and in part styled on another writer, Georges Perec, Vincenzo gave some initial notes like ‘I tried to keep figurative language to a minimum’. Most were things I would have hoped to notice anyway, but I liked working with Vincenzo because he cares about the smallest details, knowing from experience that over the length of an entire novel, making these seemingly inconsequential changes is actually the most important part of the process of reconstructing style in another language.’
Read the full interview here.
Other nominated books by Sophie Hughes
Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society
Fernanda Melchor’s formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons, written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling
A masterpiece of metafiction, Mac and His Problem is Enrique Vila-Matas’s testament to the power and playfulness of great literature
Intense, intelligent and extraordinarily sensitive, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of generational trauma
