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 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

Financial Times

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

I was hooked from the first page. This is a brutal and addictive book, one that I will return to again and again. There is not a word out of place. I’m in awe of Andrea Bajani’s powers

Avni Doshi

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

Sharp as a showdown, poignant as a farewell

Antonio Scurati

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

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 Tóibín