The Anniversary

By: Andrea Bajani, Geoffrey Brock - translator

Brought to you by Penguin.

'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.

© Andrea Bajani 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026