Perfection

Vincenzo Latronico

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They have everything to make them happy. Expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment. Young, cool digital creatives, they enjoy slow cooking, Danish furniture, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene. It's exactly the life they had imagined for themselves. But they begin to feel disillusioned, bored. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move away, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism proves fruitless, since their direct action amounts to taking an Uber only if it is snowing, tipping in cash, never eating tuna. Trapped in a lifestyle optimised for digital perfection, yearning for authenticity, they find themselves doing something they could never have predicted. Perfection was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature.