Anam: Winner of the 2024 PM's Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin

Anam is described by Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, as 'a powerful achievement'. According to The Age, the novel is 'transcendent'.

Miles Allinson praises Anam as 'a beautiful book. I loved its hypnotic rhythms, its restlessness, the way memories, dreams and ideas, like waves, kept riding in over the top of one another, undoing and complicating everything. It is the work of a soulful and scrupulous mind.' He adds, 'I loved André Dao's brilliantly restless Anam'.

The PM's Literary Awards judges comment on the novel as 'lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging, Anam is a profoundly relevant novel.'

Jessica Au reflects, 'A good book lingers and, for me, affirms any curious return to its pages. Anam, the story of a grandson's desire to make sense of his family's past and his grandfather's long imprisonment, is just this. The prose is meditative, recursive and serpentine. It is a work that wrestles with its own form and, like the best literature, escapes easy definition.'

Alex Miller is entranced by Dao's novel: 'André Dao effortlessly discards the established form of the novel in Anam and goes convincingly and mesmerisingly his own way with a level of brilliance that entranced me. The result is the most richly poetic and intelligent novel I've read in many years. Dao's search for his own inner truth is beautiful and profound.'

Nam Le reports being 'stunned by the power and beauty of Anam'.

Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he 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? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?