The prize-winning 100 000-copy Italian bestseller *A 2023 book of the year for the Financial
Times the Irish Times the New European Marie Claire and Largehearted Boy*'Deliciously
enjoyable' Katherine Heiny'I adored it' Naoise Dolan'Wild funny and disturbing' Roddy
Doyle'Thrillingly original' Monica Ali'It would be simply impossible for a book this good to go
unnoticed' Big Issue _________________________________A delightfully funny Italian novel about
sex love family - and how a writer transforms her life into artVero has grown up in Rome with
her eccentric family: 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 centre of
their attention. As she becomes an adult Vero's need to strike out on her own leads her into
bizarre and comical situations: she tries (and fails) to run away to Paris at the age of
fifteen she moves into an unwitting older boyfriend's house after they have been together for
less than a week and she sets up a fraudulent (and wildly successful) street clothing stall to
raise funds to go to Mexico. Most of all she falls in love - repeatedly dramatically and
often with the most unlikely and inappropriate of candidates.As she continues to plot escapades
and her mother's relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every
turn it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer - and a liar - inventing stories in a bid for
her own sanity.Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate Lost on Me
seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity (beginning
with Vero's first artistic achievement: a painting she steals from a school classmate and
successfully claims as her own). Deceptively simple its tenderness offset by moments of cool
brutality Lost on Me is a masterwork of human observation.
