Reading guide: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

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 tantalisingly 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.

Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome and 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, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.

Thomas McMullan, The Guardian

‘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 [George] Perec’s mode of caricature — exporting it into the present — he shows something universal about generations and their anxieties.’

‘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.

Perfection contains no dialogue, instead exclusively favouring rich and detailed description of inanimate objects. In an interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo Latronico says, ‘I have a terrible ear for dialogue and can never quote verbatim what somebody said, even at important moments of my life. But I memorise details of clothing immediately; description, more than dialogue, resonates with what seems salient to me in the world.’ How did you find the experience of reading the novel with no speech?

Latronico never refers to Anna and Tom individually; he always refers to them as a couple, with the reader unable to comprehend the couple’s separate personalities beyond their superficial experiences, habits and purchases. Latronico told Hungarian Literature Online that providing distance between the reader and the main protagonists was deliberate on his part. ‘We are used to reading literature through this mechanism of liking the characters, of supporting them, being on their side. But it’s not the only way to write. I think that I didn’t want you to like them, I wanted you to see them.’ Do you understand Latronico’s decision for portraying the characters in this way? Did you find that you saw Anna and Tom for who they were, and did you like them?

According to Latronico, Perfection was a tribute to Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties., described by the Sunday Times as ‘a witty attack on consumerism’. The two books adopt a similar structure and a highly descriptive way of writing. If you’re familiar with Perec’s novel, how do you think Latronico’s book compares? And what do you think are the main differences between consumerism in the Sixties and the 21st century?

It is never revealed in the book which country Anna and Tom originally came from, with Latronico only alluding that they are from a southern European country. Why do you think he left this information out of the novel? 

Even though they had been living in Berlin for many years, Anna and Tom never fully integrate into German society. Their friends are mostly other expats, their knowledge of the German language is minimal, and they have stopped consuming media from their home country or Berlin, instead concentrating on American and other international news sites. Why do you think they are unable to fully engage with their life in Berlin?

The author describes the couple’s apartment and the objects that, according to them, are a ‘tangible manifestation of who they were. That apartment and those objects weren’t merely reflections of their personalities: they provided a foot-hold, in their eyes proof of a grounded lifestyle, which, from another perspective (that of, say, their parents’ generation) appeared loose’ (Page 18). What do you think Latronico meant by the apartment and objects providing proof of a ‘grounded lifestyle’, and why might it appear ‘loose’ from another, older perspective?

As the years pass by and gentrification takes hold in Berlin, Anna and Tom recognise in almost imperceptible ways that they had ‘contributed to the problem that was starting to affect them.’ The narrator states that gentrification is ‘a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it’ (Page 64). Do you think that’s true, and how might Anna and Tom have contributed to this effect on the city?

There’s an underlying message woven throughout the book that millennials will never be happy or satisfied with their lives, always striving for an unattainable version of a ‘perfect’ reality. ‘It was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same. They had wanted that too, but still they weren’t satisfied. In Lisbon, Anna and Tom were bored’ (Page 93). Why do you think Anna and Tom were ultimately bored with their lives?

There is a period in which Anna and Tom become involved in the humanitarian crisis surrounding refugees, after they become aware of a photograph of a drowned boy on a beach. They volunteer at a centre set up for the refugees, but acknowledge that they ‘found it increasingly hard to feel useful,’ questioning whether their involvement had really been more about themselves. But as they posted photos on social media, ‘they would watch the likes and shares go up, and still feel sure they were doing the right thing’ (Page 73). To what extent did their participation seem genuine, or was largely performative volunteerism to gain recognition and validation online?

‘Those memories were sweet but they seemed to belong to another life entirely. For a long time, it was precisely those little details that made them feel at home – the different types of paving on the streets, the citrus motifs on the cornices covered in graffiti, the tropical plants behind the bay windows. Now that feeling had gone, even if the details that had produced it remained the same.’ (Page 83). Why do you think Anna and Tom’s feelings for Berlin and the details they used to love changed so much over the years? 

Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko

The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson