Andrea Bajani’s novel, the winner of the 2025 Strega Prize, is a radical exploration of the psychology of family estrangement. It appears at a cultural moment where therapy-oriented language such as “gaslighting”, “boundaries”, and “toxic” has percolated into the most intimate realms of daily life and adult children are fearlessly breaking taboos and going no-contact with their parents by denouncing the abuse within highly dysfunctional households. The Anniversary examines the social institution of the patriarchal nuclear family and its links to fascism in Italy, showing how domestic violence and coercive control by male members of the family are rendered invisible and normative.The totalitarian infrastructures In the novel, following a series of “unreliable memories”, the narrator recalls events that led to the final goodbye with his parents ten years ago. With the dysfunctional family at its centre, The Anniversary is an intensely psychological novel. Yet it does not treat the trauma of upbringing as a problem that can be solved through psychoanalysis. Instead, it moves outward to reflect on wider social conditions that allow totalitarian values to be reproduced in the private realms of the modern nuclear family.Bajani poses unsettling questions:“Can one abandon one’s own parents? Or rather, can one retreat from them, simply removing one’s body from the picture with a clean, decisive act? And condemn them to live out the rest of their days with a sort of phantom limb? It’s not a question one can answer yes to. One can only do it, and I did, with that definitive deliberateness that only instinct permits, because reason would recoil from it in fear.”He reflects on the moral prohibition and fear that accompany the decision to go no-contact with his parents because familial bonds, no matter how dysfunctional, are understood to be sacred and inviolable, because they are understood to exist beyond the reach of individual will.In recounting the psychological toll of growing up with an abusive parental figure, Bajani unravels the totalitarian infrastructures of the patriarchal family. The novel is a post-traumatic memoir of survival in which the narrator calmly recalls the turbulence of the past. It is the distance that he has won that becomes the condition of his clarity. In the translation, Geoffrey Brock maintains the narrator’s calm tone, preserving the slow accumulation of dread that lies at the heart of the novel.This also brings out the psychological weight of fear, which expertly balances the tension between the narrator’s composure and the reader’s unease. By remaining attentive to Bajani’s tonal precision, Brock manages to convey what the novel is ultimately about: our radical dependence on others in our early life, and the psychic cost of that dependence when it is exploited rather than nurtured. When raised in a dysfunctional family environment, one learns to survive through patterns of behaviour that are conflict-averse, in order to maintain the status quo of existing power dynamics. Bajani rejects this patriarchal inheritance, and it is also why The Anniversary speaks with particular urgency to a generation of millennials who are determined to reimagine what family can mean, as they are intent on breaking out of cycles of intergenerational trauma that have been passed down.In the novel, his parents migrate backwards from Rome to a suburban town in northwest Italy; as a result, his mother is isolated from other family members. She is dissuaded from seeking employment by her husband and is further subjected to infidelity and domestic violence. Bajani draws an important distinction between the traditional patriarchal subjugation of women within the domestic world and the far more sinister remnants of fascist totalitarianism rearing their heads within the family. In general, patriarchy functions through gender hierarchies that exclude women from the domain of work and public life, while keeping them tied to unwaged reproductive work within the house; it nonetheless permits and even encourages the cultivation of an interior private self; totalitarian power, on the other hand, seeks access to the most interior recesses in order to annihilate one’s sense of self. It is this penetration of power into the most intimate realm of nurture, habitation, and subject formation that Bajani suggests is an inheritance of fascist political ideology in ItalyThe narrator has no concrete memories of his mother, whether she was content in her marriage – in fact, as he writes, he realises that he only has a few memories of her when she visits her family. She is truly a ghost in her own house; not even the kitchen, a space socially assigned to her gender, belongs to her. All her life, she has attended to domestic chores like cooking, cleaning and changing sheets while being subjected to the absolute power of her husband, who is the “voice and arm of the law”. On introspection, he arrives at a frightening realisation that the lacuna in his memory is his unconscious absorption of his father’s attitude that women, including his own mother, are people of no consequence to anyone.A regime of absolute controlBajani diagnoses this condition as rooted in a political heritage, where the veneration of pater familias and kinship above civic duty becomes dangerously fused with fascism and Catholicism. What is terrifying is not just how the father subjects his wife and children to a regime of absolute control, abiding by the totalitarian logic of domestic tyranny, but the impunity with which such violence is rendered invisible by the community surrounding it. The neighbours call the police on hearing unbearable sounds of domestic violence inside the flat, but no one wants to legally or morally intervene in what is considered a private matter. The police take in the scene before quietly leaving. In effect, within the family, the father stands in for the ideological apparatus of a totalitarian state, a political economy that Bajani argues has led to governmental instability and nepotistic capitalism in the region. The novel speaks to children who leave as economic migrants, estranged from their own language, culture and nation, having escaped the epidemic of abusive parenting. As Bajani writes, there is a growing community of digital nomads from Rotterdam to New York to Berlin all running away from dysfunctional families. They are children who have now become parents abroad, and are asking the change in geography to do what they could not do themselves: “to protect them, distance them, save them from the ones who brought them into the world.”The cover of the UK edition of The Anniversary features Scott Kahn’s painting of “Telephone”, in which a disproportionate black Bakelite receiver lies on the floor of an empty room. The grey walls and cold lighting carry the claustrophobic stillness of a waiting room or prison cell, mirroring the suffocating atmosphere of the novel. The landline telephone in the Italian family flat of the 1990s is the only connection to the world outside, and the father controls access to it. Years after leaving home, it is on the phone that the father starts barking at his son, demanding that he return to the “doghouse” and threatening to destroy him. It is also a telephone call that makes the narrator realise that no matter the distance he puts between himself and home, a single call from his father is enough to pull him into a vortex of terror. The last telephone call he makes to his parents is from his psychoanalyst’s office, where she urges him to observe his own fear rather than be consumed by it. It is here that he understands what is truly at stake, and that his mother’s inability to protect herself and her children from her husband has manifested in an auto-immune disease. This recognition, not a rational choice but an instinct, leads him to cut the cord entirely, changing his number and never reaching out again.Through a voice of remarkable restraint, Bajani reveals how power inhabits intimacy and the difficult task of disentangling oneself from its enduring hold. Brock’s translation preserves this emotional precision, allowing the novel’s quiet intensity to emerge through what remains unsaid as much as through what is spoken. In an era when the concept of family is becoming increasingly flexible, The Anniversary shows that cutting the cord is not about guilt or abandonment, but about giving oneself permission to survive.The Anniversary, Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock, Penguin International Writers.