If You Kept a Record of Sins - Andrea Bajani, Elizabeth Harris & Edmund White

If You Kept a Record of Sins

By Andrea Bajani, Elizabeth Harris & Edmund White

  • Release Date: 2021-03-23
  • Genre: Fiction & Literature

Description

Andrea Bajani's "beautiful, original, and deeply moving" (Michael Cunningham) novel, which Jhumpa Lahiri asserts "accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm."

A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother's newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother's funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today's Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.