Join us for a hugely exciting evening with Vincenzo Latronico to discuss his International Booker-shortlisted novel Perfection.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, Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.
Please note: Start time of 7pm
An astute, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations. — The International Booker Prize 2025 judgesPerfection 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 TimesPerfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vicenzo Latronico is the finest of writers. — Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster WildsPerfection captures with uncanny precision the sorry state of things in an era where abundance – of choices, of possessions, of personal freedoms – has brought the opposite of fulfillment. — Sarah Moorhouse, Spectator
