“Poignant…Bajani writes masterfully of the confusion that marked the narrator’s early life, as well as the sadness that comes with the truth. The result is cathartic.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Irresistible…honest, harsh, and unequivocally human…a story that leaves no one indifferent.” —Vogue Adria
“[The ‘domestic hell’] that Bajani depicts here is positively haunting…Bajani’s prose is sharp and brims with psychological insights…Perhaps its most salient feature—in deft translation by Geoffrey Brock—is its skill at depicting alienation…Like Albert Camus, Bajani is a poet of estrangement.” —Times Literary Supplement
“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 Century
“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, author of Burnt Sugar
QUICK VIEW
