About the Book
In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the house: four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect.
It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze. Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father’s judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect—how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder?
As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately—this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.
Format: Paperback (242 pages) Publisher: World Editions
Publication date: 7th April 2026 Genre: Fiction
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My Review
The book alternates between two timelines – one set in the near future and the other in the 1980s – which progress in opposite directions chronologically.
In the storyline set in the near future, Milan is a city shrouded in dense fog, the result of climate change. There is social unrest prompting calls from some for construction of a wall to separate the crime-ridden parts of the city from the rest. All this gives an unsettling feel to the book, a suitable backdrop as it turns out to events in the house on Via Saterna. Irene has been commissioned to sell the house at auction by a lawyer named Ferrari. A specialist in selling heritage properties to wealthy investors, Irene is confident she can get a good price even given its unusual design. Ferrari is not so sure about its arcihtectural merits, adding ‘I would venture a certain amount of bad luck looms over this property.’
Irene sets about researching the history of the house and making an inventory of its contents. What she comes across both surprises and alarms her. And there are things that just don’t make sense. As she spends more time in the house, it starts to exert a strange pull on her.
The second storyline unfolds in reverse chronological order, gradually revealing the events that led up to the death in 1986 of Lidia, the young woman who once owned the house and commissioned its ambitious redesign. As the reader discovers, it’s a tragedy born out of a betrayal whose consequences will be played out in a most unexpected way decades later.
There are very many clever touches such as the fact the design of the house on Via Saterna is centred around a skylight through which the sun illuminates a silver basin filled with water at certain points of the day, whereas Milan is now shrouded in fog so dense that sunlight rarely penetrates it.
The Perfect Circle is a very cleverly plotted story with an ending that reflects the book’s title in a most satisfying way.
I received a review copy courtesy of World Editions via NetGalley.
In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, assured
About the Author
Claudia Petrucci studied Modern Letters in Milan before moving to Perth, Australia. Her reportages and short stories—which range from realistic to weird to science fiction—have been published on Cadillac, minima&moralia, and elsewhere.
The Performance is her debut novel. It was shortlisted for the John Fante Award and won the prestigious Premio Flaiano Giovani, for writers under 30. It was also book of the day on Fahrenheit, an Italian radio program, and it has been translated into German and French. The Perfect Circle is her second novel to be translated into English. (Photo/bio: Publisher author page)
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About the Translator
Anne Milano Appel is a translator and a former library administrator, and she has a doctorate in Romance languages. She has translated works by a number of leading Italian authors, including the award-winning Antonio Scurati and Paolo Maurensig. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation.
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