Anam

Judges' comments

To describe Anam as a novel about an unnamed narrator reconnecting with his Vietnamese roots may be an accurate summary, but it is a disservice to the depth and power of André Dao’s achievement. This is a genre-defying exploration of fiction, memory, essays, philosophy, family history, geography and so much more. It is about a search for a lost grandfather, for a reimagining of home, and of the interplay between colonisers and the colonised.

Bouncing between Cambridge, Vietnam, France and Australia, through time and perspectives, Dao has somehow managed to keep the reader afloat through masterful language and innovative structure. There are even moments of self-awareness that lift this book above so many others with similar ambitions, for example when the narrator’s wife Lauren says, ‘The elegiac is apolitical … It sucks the air out of the anger and righteousness you need to change things. It makes a useful thing — a memory of injustice — into a pretty bauble.’ This is a book about seeking what is lost to time and place, and what it takes to find yourself in that search.