Description

‘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.

Publisher Review

The tri umph of this short, some times heart break ing book is its patient atten tion to human psy cho logy ... Leth ally judi cious, The Anniversary lingers in the mind long after you close it * Spectator * A fearless, intimate tale of unhappy parents - and the release of leaving them behind ... Bajani carefully calibrates the tensions in the story, a balancing act that Geoffrey Brock skilfully retains in his English translation ... as complex and contradictory as a family * Financial Times * Like Albert Camus, Bajani is a poet of estrangement, ever focused on the condition that eats at the heart of modern man, perpetually pitting him against himself * TLS * Written with wisdom and coiled passion, The Anniversary dramatizes the struggles of a wife and a mother for freedom, autonomy and self-realization against the forces of repression. It is a brilliant portrait of a single soul and her interior life, but also of a society in flux, in the process of change, in the process also of staying the same. Bajani's novel is intense, sharply imagined and fascinating -- Colm Toibin The Anniversary is about patriarchy and family and the dream of self-determination. It is also about the possibilities of fiction and the novel as a form. Bajani is an extraordinary and uncompromising artist. Every page is written with lucidity, depth, honesty and forensic intelligence -- Katie Kitamura A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other -- Jhumpa Lahiri With a voice both implacable and refined, Andrea Bajani plants a mine under the picture of a family. And he makes it explode in his truest book yet -- Donatella Di Pietrantonio A deeply affecting, important book. A sharp analysis and at the same time a tragic farewell to one's own family -- Jenny Erpenbeck I was hooked from the first page. This is a brutal and addictive book, one that I will return to again and again. There is not a word out of place. I'm in awe of Andrea Bajani's powers -- Avni Doshi I have read more than one Bajani novel. Each is completely unexpected, and each is somehow startling and able to take up residence in my life. This is what I long for in a novel. Bajani is a rare, rare find -- Richard Ford