The Burden of Memory (virtual)

In three astonishing new novels, the past hovers over the present like a ghost. In Italian writer Andrea Bajani’s If You Kept a Record of Sins (translated by Elizabeth Harris), a mother’s abandonment lingers on in the memory of her grown son. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, contends with the echoes of the country’s thirty-year civil war. And in Haitian writer Myriam J.A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, the island’s devastating 2010 earthquake is recalled with an eerie relevance. Moderated by Anderson Tepper.