An award-winner and bestseller of 100,000 copies in Veronica Raimo’s native Italy, Lost on Me is an irreverent and hilariously inverted bildungsroman from one of the 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 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.

Praise for Lost on Me:

“Veronica Raimo is the only person whose prose has made me laugh out loud since I was a teenager.”—Zerocalcare

“Niente di Vero is the naughty grandson of The Family Lexicon… Raimo has tapped the novelistic potential of her affections and, without succumbing to the temptation of stigmatizing them, has transformed them into comedy, perfecting a side of herself that pairs well with her prose: generous and benevolent humor. The result deserves all of the praise flaunted on the cover.”—Il Corriere della Sera

“An intimate, painful and sarcastic novel, one of the few things you can’t miss in this troubled and uncertain summer.”—Vanity Fair Italia

“Veronica Raimo… gifts us a desecrating and tender portrait of family that reels us in from the very first lines.”—Io Donna: Il Corriere della Sera

“Life’s obstacles enter Raimo’s novel and immediately become comedy thanks to her clear gaze and sharp writing.”—La Repubblica

“No one speaks with as much frankness and agility, no one knows how to dramatize with so little and without even a stage… Veronica Raimo is a stupendous comedian.”—La Stampa

“Veronica Raimo, protagonist and narrator, within this affectionate, highly explosive subject tells a story that nails us down with a powerful first person, clear and exhilarating.”—Marie Claire Italia

“Veronica Raimo manages to say with precision how difficult, uncertain, it is to exist. Thus one laughs a lot, and thanks to the fact that the writer does not, forgives oneself.”—Il Foglio