The Anniversary

Andrea Bajani is the author of several award-winning novels including If You Kept a Record of Sins, Every Promise and The Book of Homes , which have been translated into over twenty languages. The Anniversary was a huge best-seller in Italy and won the Strega Prize in 2025. Born in Rome, he now teaches creative writing at Rice University in Texas.>

Autorentext
Andrea Bajani is the author of several award-winning novels including If You Kept a Record of Sins, Every Promise and The Book of Homes, which have been translated into over twenty languages. The Anniversary was a huge best-seller in Italy and won the Strega Prize in 2025. Born in Rome, he now teaches creative writing at Rice University in Texas. Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry and the award-winning translator of numerous volumes from Italian.

Klappentext
'A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other' Jhumpa Lahiri

'Intense, sharply imagined and fascinating' Colm Toibin

'On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I've changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I've erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They've been the best ten years of my life.'

A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others' lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?

At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.