Description

Shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

‘A profound meditation on forgiveness and forgetting . . . Dao’s extraordinary debut novel combines fiction and history to chronicle his Vietnamese grandparents’ traumatic life.’ – The Observer

Moving from 1930s Hanoi through wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, a deeply moving novel of memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, exile and home.

Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystallize the strands of thought that have shaped his life.

Andre Dao’s Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?

Publisher Review

A profound meditation on forgiveness and forgetting . . . Dao’s extraordinary debut novel combines fiction and history to chronicle his Vietnamese grandparents’ traumatic life. * The Observer * Andre Dao’s Anam . . . confirms his status as a young writer to watch . . . Blending fiction and essay, Anam is about a grandson trying to learn his family story and explores ideas of home, exile and identity. * The Sydney Morning Herald * This impressive novel illuminates lives that rarely come to the attention of readers. Braiding fiction, essay, family stories and history, the result is a profoundly moving remembrance of things past as well as an invitation to look to the future. There is kindness and insight on every page. — Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel Admirable in its scope, Anam melds theory, fiction and essay . . . which come together for a universal experience of loss and belonging. * The Irish Times * Riveting, wise, transporting, Anam turns its back on the memory industrial complex and keeps the past unassimilable, both dangerous and fragile. — Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic Anam is a beautiful book. I loved its hypnotic rhythms, its restlessness, the way memories, dreams and ideas, like waves, kept riding in over the top of one another, undoing and complicating everything. It is the work of a soulful and scrupulous mind. — Miles Allinson, author of Fever of Animals Dao has a mesmeric and unique style that is both brave and profound, a style that captures the voices of those that may not always have had one… A magnificent debut. * The Australian * Andre Dao’s ambitious debut… offers something defiant and distinct, unsentimental yet tender… Nothing in Australian literature has challenged me in a way that feels so profoundly personal. * The Saturday Paper * Anam gently pulls us into a deepening flow of memory… untangling the endlessly knotted problems of memory, inheritance and home… Anam is a rigorous and generous book, which will sit with you well after reading. * Melbourne Age * Uncompromising and honest, Anam is a brilliant book of immense scope…. Original and convincing… in terms of thematic, linguistic, and cultural scope, Anam is a fine example of what a global novel should be like. It beautifully connects East and West; Europe and Australasia; Oceania and the Middle East. * The Conversation *