Anam (André Dao, Hamish Hamilton)

Winner of the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Anam is a remarkable debut novel exploring memory, family, colonialism and displacement. The narrator, a young Vietnamese-Australian man who has recently become a father, sifts through family letters, photographs and stories of war, sacrifice and migration in an attempt to understand—and retell—his grandparents’ history. A work of autofiction, the novel hinges on the narrator’s career as a former human rights lawyer now turned scholar, perhaps influenced by author André Dao’s work documenting stories of asylum seekers in Australia. This is one way Dao skilfully braids fiction, theory and history to connect the past with the present. At once an absorbing and tender family saga and a philosophical meditation on memory and the ethics of retelling intergenerational histories, Anam is written in short, fragmented chapters that effortlessly move through time and place—from 1930s Hanoi to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge. The history that the narrator is trying to retrace is one of war and tragedy that cannot be told in a linear fashion, nor without reflections, doubt and ghosts, and so Dao offers the reader one piece of the story at a time. In doing so, he explores memory and remembering not only as an inheritance, but also as a way of creating a future. Anam is an epic feat that showcases Dao’s talent for storytelling, and will appeal to fans of Ocean Vuong, Nam Le and Madeleine Thien.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Anthea Yang is a writer and editor living in Naarm/Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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