The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani

Can you leave your parents behind? Can you slam the door, walk down the stairs, and decide never to see them again? Can you ever escape the grip of your origins? A son asks himself these questions as he celebrates a bittersweet anniversary: it is a decade since he saw his parents. Now he finally feels able to tell their story. This is his lucid portrait of a family devastated by a father's violence and the woman who silently accepts him; of an airless relationship, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, a visiting classmate or a friend who is soon rejected. And it is the story of how a son is possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free: to be himself, to live his own life, to open up to others without fear of reprisals.