The Anniversary

“A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other.” —Jhumpa Lahiri

A subtle yet heartrending portrait of an abusive marriage in patriarchal Italy and a son’s liberating decision to cut contact with his parents.

Can you leave your family 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: a decade since he saw his parents. Now he finally feels able to tell their story. This is his eloquent account 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 soon pushed away. And it is the story of a son 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.“A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake

“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, author of The Sportswriter

“The Anniversary, written with wisdom and coiled passion, 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 Tóibín, author of Long Island

“The Anniversary is about patriarchy and family and the dream of self-determination. It is 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, author of Intimacies

“A deeply affecting, important book. A sharp analysis and at the same time a tragic farewell to one’s own family.” —Jenny Erpenbeck, author of Kairos and Go, Went, Gone

“Can you get rid of your parents? Of the harm they’ve done you? No looking back, no chance to appeal? It’s a scandalous question. Andrea Bajani confronts it through writing, in a book that is scandalously calm.” —Emmanuel Carrère, author of V13: Chronicle of a Trial

“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, author of A Girl Returned

“In every family, there is a locked room where nobody goes. The voice that guides us breaks into this very room. And we follow it, moved by its vulnerability and startled by what we see. At once a merciless and beautiful book.” —Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter

“Sharp as a showdown, poignant as a farewell.” —Antonio Scurati, author of M: Son of the CenturyAndrea Bajani was born in Rome in 1975. He is the author of many award-winning novels, including If You Kept a Record of Sins and The Book of Homes. The Anniversary received Italy’s highest literary award, the Strega Prize, in 2025 and will be published in more than twenty-five countries. He is currently a writer in residence at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Geoffrey Brock is author of three collections of poetry, editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and translator of numerous books of poetry, prose, and comics, most recently Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, which received the National Translation Award in Poetry. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Cullman Center. He teaches at the University of Arkansas, where he is the founding editor of The Arkansas International.