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Perfection

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Perfection

By: Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Hughes -translator
Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
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About this listen

A 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee

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 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 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?

©2022 Vincenzo Latronico; Translation copyright 2025 by Sophie Hughes (P)2025 Tantor Media City Life Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Urban World Literature

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I think this book plays on the idea of what is perfection? In terms of where you live, your job, your time and really is it attainable? This couple is searching for something that may or may not exist for them. And in the end is your idea of perfection everything you thought it would be??? Did I enjoy this book not really but I think I need a re listen

Perfection???

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Beautifully written .
A very good spoken performance . I would read anything else this writer has done or will do .

Very good

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Perfectly observed tale of the chase for the perfect instagram life and how it eats itself! The clichéd living made me chuckle. I know too many digi nomads like them.

Prediction

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I didn’t like this to begin with but it did grow on me. It has a certain charm. Well read and some helpful insights along the way. Everything’s compressed, once addressed themes drop out of view in a disconcerting way. It is no bad thing that it is just as long as it is.

Well realised … a brief life

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This is an atmospheric account of two digital nomads from an unamed North European country living in Berlin as part of the hipster influx of the first decade of the new century. It's insightful. satirical and somewhat sad about the search for something that proves always just out of reach. The problem is that it reads more like social commentary by an urban sociologist in the New Yorker or London Review of Books than a novel. The couple are the only characters, but they have no direct voice and there is no dialogue of any kind. This has an inevitably flattening effect, but if you can live with that it has its own fascinations. The narrator isn't given much to work with, but has a pleasant voice.

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