Andrea Bajani’s short novel The Anniversary won the Premio Strega in 2025 and has since become an international bestseller. It is narrated by a fifty-one-year-old man who, ten years earlier, cut all ties with his family, and who, on the anniversary of that audacious and purifying move, looks back and tries to make sense of the events that led to it.
It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds of a family dominated by an abusive father. References accumulate less to incidents than to the overwhelming atmosphere of dread between those incidents, ‘the looming threat that tightens our throats’; ‘a constant sense of impending danger … the possibility that everything would suddenly, for reasons we couldn’t understand, burst into flames’. What is registered more than the moments of actual violence, which later receive a brief and devastating summary almost in passing, is the effect on the other family members, cowed into silence or complicity, and bearing, it is implied, permanent damage.
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