The Anniversary - by Andrea Bajani Paperback

Book Synopsis

A subtle yet heartrending portrait of an abusive marriage and a son's liberating decision to leave his family and his home in Italy.

Can you abandon your own father and mother? Can you slam the door, descend the stairs, resolve to never see them again? Can you escape the stranglehold of your own origin?

Ten years after fleeing the interminable tension of a muted yet constant domestic violence, a son is finally able to recount his family story and the taboo of his total estrangement. He commemorates this piercing anniversary without accusation or salvation.

The lucid and burning story that results is the portrait of a woman who has given up, who has renounced everything in order to exist in her husband's eyes. He drags her and their children along in his flight from the world, ensnaring them a regime that is as patriarchal as it is paranoid. The impregnable isolation in which they are confined is threatened now and then by a ringing telephone, by a schoolmate, by his wife's abruptly banished friend.

In this dysfunctional reality, an insuppressible desire for rebirth burgeons in the son. A desire to be himself, to live his life, to open himself to others without fear of retaliation. And it is clear that to save himself, nothing from that world can be saved.

About the Author

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 twenty-five countries. He is currently a writer in residence 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.