Lost on Me

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024

In this irreverent and hilariously inverted bildungsroman, award-winning and bestselling Italian author Veronica Raimo transforms neurosis, sex and family disaster into brilliant comedy reminiscent of Fleabag and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon.

Already a bestseller and award winner in Italy, Lost on Me is a burningly witty novel of a young woman’s coming of age in a neurotic family from one of Italy’s most celebrated young writers working today.

Born into a family with an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the center of their attention, our heroine Vero languishes in boredom in her childhood home. Peering through tiny windows at children in the streets below while cramped in her family coven, Vero periodically attempts to strike out but is no match for her mother’s relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery. Vero’s every venture outside their Rome apartment ends in her being unceremoniously returned home. It’s no wonder then that she becomes a writer - and a liar – inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity.

Spikey and clever, Vero delights in her own devious schemes. As she guides us through her failed attempts at emancipation, her discovery of sex and fixations with unwitting men, and ultimately her contentious relationship with reality, she also brings alive Rome from the 1980s through the early 2000’s. With restless intelligence and covert tenderness Veronica Raimo takes the traditional family novel tropes and flips them inside out. Pointed, feisty, and pulsing with energy, Lost on Me takes on the uncertain enterprise of becoming a woman.