If You Kept a Record of Sins
  • Published: 18 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810960
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $35.00

If You Kept a Record of Sins

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Andrea Bajani's "beautiful, original, and deeply moving" (Michael Cunningham) novel, which Jhumpa Lahiri asserts "accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm."

Andrea Bajani's "beautiful, original, and deeply moving" (Michael Cunningham) novel, which Jhumpa Lahiri asserts "accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm."

A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother's newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother's funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today's Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.
  • Published: 18 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810960
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for If You Kept a Record of Sins

  • "Andrea Bajani's haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm. The impact is shattering, pure. With themes of distance and dislocation at its heart, this celebrated novel by one of Italy's most talented young writers now resonates in English thanks to Elizabeth Harris' limpid translation." -- Jhumpa Lahiri
  • "A beautiful, original, and deeply moving work of art. It would be a gift at any time in history and is all the more so now, as the world moves through one of its darker periods." -- Michael Cunningham
  • "If You Kept a Record of Sins is written with grace and calm control. It deals with loss, especially the loss of a mother, with a chiseled sense of truth. Each image and each moment are captured with exquisite emotional accuracy. The connection between the past and the present is dramatized with skill. The protagonist is, like the author himself, someone on whom nothing is lost." -- Colm Tóibín
  • "One of Italy's greatest writers . . . An elegy, a requiem, a reckoning, a broken portrait of an absent mother, If You Kept a Record of Sins is a jewel of a book. You will hold it to your heart when you are done." -- Andrew Sean Greer, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Less