Anam, the debut novel by Melbourne writer André Dao, is told through the eyes of a human rights lawyer who has paused his life in Melbourne to return to study in Cambridge, England. With his young family in tow, he embarks on a dissertation that seeks to reclaim the past for his family, who have been long separated by war, violence, and colonialism.

Growing up in Melbourne the child of Vietnamese refugees, his youth is defined by the life of his grandfather, a Catholic intellectual and lawyer, who was jailed without charge for 10 years in Chí Hòa Prison in the 1980s. The remaining family leaves Vietnam – the grandmother to France – and a prolonged limbo ensues until his release.

As a young man, the grandson starts recording conversations with his grandparents, aunts, and uncles, gathering documents to piece together the familial threads into something cohesive. But the past, and each family member’s perspective on it, eludes a harmonious narrative. Separation and loss beget a form of stasis in which old wounds remain open.

Ultimately, the grandson must balance his need to make sense of the past with creating a future for his own family. In a letter to his daughter, he writes, ‘... I thought that telling might itself be a home ... that I could take those stories and write a home for you ...’

Throughout Anam, Dao leans in and stays with the complexities of a family riven by war and diaspora, and of lives defined by loss. Some things cannot be resolved and, as the grandson observes, both memory and forgetting are needed to create a present in which one can live one’s life: ‘We can’t redeem the past for those who lived through it.’

Anam is an enthralling and challenging novel, with moments both painful and tender. It is a profoundly beautiful debut.