📖 Winner of the 2025 Premio Strega
Some books don’t need to shout to be heard. They speak in whispers, with quiet intensity, and leave a lasting echo. The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani is one of those novels: short in length, but emotionally profound, haunting, and beautifully written.
The story takes place over a single day. Ten years earlier, the narrator made a radical decision: to cut ties with his parents entirely. On the anniversary of that choice, he returns to his childhood home, now empty, still filled with objects and ghosts. What unfolds is a powerful interior monologue, a conversation with absence.
There is no screaming, no accusations. Just the stillness of memory, the weight of silence, and the delicate pain of a son who has chosen to leave in order to survive.
The father is portrayed as controlling and emotionally oppressive—a looming presence, even in absence. The mother is quieter, almost fading into the background, a shadow of complicity. The narrator has built a life without them, and yet this return opens up the need to revisit, to reflect, to understand what that break truly meant.
📌 One line stayed with me:
“They were the best ten years of my life.”
It may sound cold, but it isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity. It’s the relief of finally living freely, of breathing without fear.
🔹 About the author
Andrea Bajani, born in Rome in 1975, is one of Italy’s most internationally recognized literary voices. He has published novels, short stories, essays, and poetry, and teaches creative writing in Italy and the United States. His earlier works include If You Kept a Record of Sins (awarded the SuperMondello Prize), Every Promise, and The Book of Homes, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Premio Strega. Bajani is known for his elegant prose and his ability to explore emotional complexity and family dynamics with sensitivity and precision.
💬 Why read it?
The Anniversary isn’t a loud book, but it speaks volumes. It explores the emotional cost of breaking away from one’s origins—not as rebellion, but as an act of self-preservation. It’s about finding dignity and voice in silence, about naming what was never spoken.
This novel is short but resonant. It’s a meditation on family, distance, and the fragile boundaries between freedom and belonging.
If you’re drawn to fiction that is quiet, poetic, and emotionally brave, this book will stay with you long after the last page.
Nadia Fronteddu