The Anniversary

The astonishing novel that’s taking Italy by storm ... Stories about poisonous childhoods are not exactly new, but something about The Anniversary makes us feel that we’ve never heard one quite like this ... A pleasure to read -- Francine Prose * Daily Telegraph *
Harrowing and compelling ... A ferocious work of literature... the writing feels intensely personal – almost obscenely intimate – but glimmers with moments of recognition -- Chris Power * Observer *
Like Albert Camus, Bajani is a poet of estrangement, ever focused on the condition that eats at the heart of modern man, perpetually pitting him against himself * TLS *
The tri­umph of this short, some­times heart­break­ing book is its patient atten­tion to human psy­cho­logy … Leth­ally judi­cious, The Anniversary lingers in the mind long after you close it * Spectator *
A fearless, intimate tale of unhappy parents — and the release of leaving them behind ... Bajani carefully calibrates the tensions in the story, a balancing act that Geoffrey Brock skilfully retains in his English translation ... as complex and contradictory as a family -- John Self * Financial Times *
An ambitious tale of family rupture ... In the narrator’s hands, the novel becomes a vehicle for retrospective discovery ... The narrator’s interest in his mother feels genuine and the enterprise of giving this woman space in the book that she didn’t manage to claim in their home is generous and original -- Lara Feigel * Guardian *
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 Tóibín
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
Both melancholic and provocative, but also perfectly written, this book is an important piece of literature about this curse we call family -- Édouard Louis
A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other -- Jhumpa Lahiri