The Anniversary - Paperback

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by Andrea Bajani (Author), Geoffrey Brock (Translator)

"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.

Author Biography

Andrea 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 thirty countries. Bajani teaches creative writing 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.

Number of Pages: 144

Dimensions: 0.4 x 7.98 x 5.39 IN

Publication Date: August 25, 2026