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

The Anniversary

  • Andrea Bajani
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A beautiful and merciless novel about the tyranny of the family — and a highly acclaimed 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.'

A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others’ lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?

At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It 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

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

A merciless and beautiful book

Georgi Gospodinov

A scandalously calm book

Emmanuel Carrère

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

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

Written with wisdom and coiled passion, The Anniversary 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