Book Club 2026
In 2026, Open Doors is delighted to continue the partnership with Alexandra Lawrence* to read four books – one per season – by Italian authors in translation. This year we have chosen books that have been nominated for the International Booker Prize. Each season Open Door editor Lauren Mouat and Alexandra will have an online discussion about the book before opening it up to a group discussion.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter to receive reading questions & dates and links for the zoom discussion. We hope to see you there!
*Alexandra Lawrence is a cultural entrepreneur based in Florence. She is a founder of All Street Italy, creating curated meaningful experiences in Naples and beyond and regularly hosts online courses on Florentine art, history and literature. Her Illuminare Book Club on Substack has spent 2024 reading Italian female authors in translation and we could not be more thrilled to read these four books with her in 2025!
Book Club Selection for 2026
Spring (March 2nd 5pm-6pm – Italy)
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico follows Anna and Tom, a young expat couple living in Berlin, whose life appears impeccably curated—beautiful apartment, creative work, international friendships. Yet beneath the surface of this carefully arranged existence lies a growing sense of emptiness and repetition.
As the years pass, their search for freedom, authenticity, and meaning becomes increasingly constrained by the very ideals they once embraced. With cool precision and quiet unease, Latronico captures the paradoxes of contemporary life—mobility without belonging, intimacy without depth, and a generation caught between aspiration and inertia.
Summer (June)
Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko.
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 while cramped in her family coven, Vero periodically attempts to strike out but is no match for her mother’s relentless tracking methods and masterful guilt trips. Vero’s every venture outside their Rome apartment ends in her being unceremoniously returned home. It’s no wonder 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 1980’s through the early 2000’s. With restless intelligence and covert tenderness, Lost on Me takes on the uncertain enterprise of becoming a woman.
Fall (September)
The House on via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky.
A modest apartment in Via Gemito smelling of paint and turpentine. Its furniture pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio. Drying canvases moved from bed to floor each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced that he possesses great artistic promise. If it weren’t for the family he must feed and the jealousy of his fellow Neapolitan artists, nothing would stop him from becoming a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but also arrogant and resentful, Federí is scarred by constant disappointment. He is a larger-than-life character, a liar, a fabulist, and his fantasies shape the lives of those around him, especially his young son, Mimi, short for Domenico, who will spend a lifetime trying to get out from under his father’s shadow.
Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, author of New York Times notable book of the year, Ties, and the critically acclaimed Trust, takes readers beyond the slim, novella-length works for which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.
Winter (December)
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.
The Story of the Lost Child concludes the saga of Elena and Lila, two women bound by a lifelong friendship that has shaped their choices, ambitions, and escapes. Both fought to leave the violent, restrictive Naples neighborhood where they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, built a literary career, and raised a family, only to find herself drawn back to Naples by its inescapable pull. Lila never left; instead, she became a powerful entrepreneur whose success entangles her even more deeply with the corruption and violence she despises.
Set against a Naples that is both seductive and dangerous, and a world in rapid transformation, Elena Ferrante delivers a piercing final portrait of female friendship—its loyalties, rivalries, and enduring force—told with unflinching insight and emotional power.