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  • Published: 2 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802069655
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144
Categories:

The Anniversary

  • Andrea Bajani


A powerful slim novel about the tyranny of the family -- a huge bestseller in Italy

'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.

  • Published: 2 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802069655
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144
Categories:

Praise for The Anniversary

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

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 Toibin

A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other

Jhumpa Lahiri

A deeply affecting, important book. A sharp analysis and at the same time a tragic farewell to one’s own family

Jenny Erpenbeck

Gripping and highly original. Bajani feels no need to condemn or forgive. Instead, he shows us how arduous and necessary the path to redemption truly is

Emanuele Trevi

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

Sharp as a showdown, poignant as a farewell

Antonio Scurati

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
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