Lost on Me

A delightfully funny, bestselling, prize-winning Italian novel about sex, love, family - and how a writer transforms her life into art

Highly entertaining, thought-provoking and one of 2023's best novels yet

Funny and tender

Wild, funny and disturbing, all I ask of a book about mothers and their daughters.

Excellent ... written in a spare and precise style from the pen of a biting narrator. It would be simply impossible for a book this good to go unnoticed

Remarkable. A darkly funny novel of rhythm, subtlety and nuance ... a writer who deserves as wide an audience as possible

Restless and sly ... intelligently spiky

I fell head over heels in love with Lost on Me . What a thrillingly original voice! Raimo writes with a tender brutality that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking

I adored Lost on Me . With combustive prose and oxidising wit, Veronica Raimo sets fire to the Bildungsroman. A clear-eyed comedic talent who bends the novel form to her will

A uproariously funny portrait of an unconventional family from a writer who knows the sliver of ice in the heart as well as she knows love. This deliciously enjoyable novel is a true original and one to savour

When the book you start reading is immediately hilarious and deeply disturbing , you know you're onto something special. Lost on Me is that book

Is it possible, today, to completely reinvent auto-fiction? For Veronica Raimo it clearly is. Get ready to talk about this book for a long, long time

This book made me want to clear my calendar and read everything of Raimo's I could get my hands on. Incisive, engrossing, and deeply funny

Like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, Veronica Raimo mocks the absurdities of her family life as well as tries to reconcile her own ambiguous feelings. A bold, provocative, and original book

A desecrating and tender portrait of family that reels us in from the very first lines

Many pages in this novel are so intense and unscrupulous that one feels the apprehension of being caught spying in a stranger's mailbox

Reading this novel is a blast ... Many of the pages are jellyfish stings: they burn on and on

Veronica Raimo is a stupendous comedian

A story that nails us down with a powerful first-person voice, clear and exhilarating.

With its stellar voice, Raimo's inquisitive and vulnerable novel proves tough to put down

Lost on Me is the naughty grandson of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon ... Raimo has tapped the novelistic potential of her affections and has transformed them into comedy. The result deserves all of the praise flaunted on the cover

Filled with humour and neuroses ... a witty and complex portrait of a woman becoming herself

Lost on Me was anything but; I was utterly seduced by this wry and fearless novel featuring the unforgettable voice of Vero, a young woman with a sharp sense of humour and a splendid eye for the absurd

What a fresh, vivid and unpredictable voice, bursting with life, I loved it . Finally something that's not like everything else.

This bittersweet work of autofiction charts Verika's journey through her neurotic childhood to womanhood and her attempts - literal and metaphorical - to escape her family and their influence. Smart, funny ... a sharply tender portrait of a young woman's becoming

If Sheila Heti was Italian and wrote a modern Franny & Zooey , it would approximate how powerful and magnificent Veronica Raimo's novel Lost on Me is.

Infused with a hilarious dry wit wrung from a wry attitude to life, Lost On Me stands out as a brilliant and inventive modern novel in English thanks to an outstanding translation for which Leah Janeczko deserves much credit

If you enjoy Deborah Levy or Natalia Ginzburg, then you'll appreciate the writing of Italian author and translator, Veronica Raimo. Deeply original and with kudos from Naoise Dolan and Katherine Heiny, this bildungsroman follows Vero, a 15-year-old girl, writer and compulsive liar as she plots various bids for freedom, all of which are thwarted by her savvy mother. The film rights have been snapped up by Fandango, so look out for news of a future movie

A brilliant example of the best in translated fiction: Leah Janeczko maintains the book's innate ambiguity and swerving nuance to produce one of the best novels in translation of recent years

Absolutely fantastic. I'm often at a loss for what to say or how to even describe a book that envelops one as totally as this one did.

Veronica Raimo is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, Lost On Me ( Niente di Vero ) was shortlisted for the Premio Strega Prize and won the Strega Giovani Prize and the Viareggio Rèpaci Prize. She contributes cultural articles to various Italian publications, and her translations into Italian include works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. She lives in Rome.