Andrea Bajani – författare

'A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other' Jhumpa Lahiri'Intense, sharply imagined and fascinating' Colm Toibin'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.

From prizewinning Italian author Andrea Bajani: the secrets of a man and his country as seen through the eyes of the homes that have guarded them.A finalist for Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize, The Book of Homes is a remarkable achievement: a sprawling story that unfolds across much of Italy and yet that is told within the confines of the homes of its characters—and often from the point of view of the homes themselves: the many homes that shaped our main character named “I,” though the novel is in third-person; the home of I’s childhood companion, a turtle in her shell; the final homes of two figures whose murders shattered a country: a kidnapped, murdered politician; a poet dead in the street, run over by his own car. . . Both chilling and touching, The Book of Homes is an ambitious coming-of-age story unlike any other. One that jumps from home to home, upstairs to downstairs, decade to decade, and slowly reveals the blueprints—the puzzle pieces—to a life’s story.Extraordinary, emotionally resonant, and utterly unique, The Book of Homes affirms Andrea Bajani’s status as a major force in contemporary international literature, and dares readers to consider what they’d be willing to give up in order to keep themselves.

A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother's newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother's funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today's Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.