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The Anniversary

byAndrea Bajani, Geoffrey Brock (Translator)

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'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.'

Can you leave your parents behind? Can you slam the door, walk down the stairs, and decide never to see them again? Can you ever escape the grip of your origins?


A son asks himself these questions as he celebrates a bittersweet anniversary: it is a decade since he saw his parents. Now he finally feels able to tell their story. This is his lucid portrait of a family devastated by a father’s violence and the woman who silently accepts him; of an airless relationship, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, a visiting classmate or a friend who is soon rejected. And it is the story of how a son is possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free: to be himself, to live his own life, to open up to others without fear of reprisals.


The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It wounds with its honesty and becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.

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

About Andrea Bajani

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.
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