Walter Benjamin’s angel of history appears in Anam several times, one ghost among many. The angel, Benjamin wrote, would like to ‘awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ Only neither is possible, Dao knows this – he spent ten years looking to escape the false consolations that narratives of the familial past, of be-longing and dis-placement, offer up to the diasporic writer.

What does Dao do? He keeps shards from the smashed world, drops the glue, refuses reassembly, he lets the dead speak for themselves, which is to say, to unreservedly haunt the living. Anam knows how to be steadfastly rigorous without sacrificing tenderness, knows that lyricism can sharpen thought. Dao works with shimmer, echoes, voices stretching time and space like rain to make a novel of many worlds and no shortcuts, it’s mesmerising, and uncompromising in its moral seriousness.

Riveting, wise, transporting, Anam turns its back on the memory industrial complex and keeps the past unassimilable, both dangerous and fragile.

— Maria Tumarkin

Anam is a major work by a writer certain to make a mark on Australian literature. Both an unflinching exploration of identity, belonging, memory and history, and a poignant love letter to family, this book is fiercely intelligent, profoundly human, and deeply moving.

— Emily Bitto