Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of wars and displacements to Saigon Paris Melbourne
and Cambridge a deeply moving novel of memory and inheritance colonialism and belonging
exile and home. Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne the narrator is haunted by the
story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam's
notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a
human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his
Vietnamese heritage it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of
his daughter that crystallize the strands of thought that have shaped his life. André Dao's
Anam blends fiction and essay theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been
repressed left out and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through
letters photographs government documents and memories he has his own family to think about:
a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for
them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?
