It can be easier to shave those rough edges off, simplifying the stories, making them easier to hold and consider. It's certainly easy to do this with history from a time beyond living memory: fewer voices to contradict, to complicate.

André Dao is working in the prickliest form of history: a personal, family story that happened mostly before he was born but continued into his own lifetime. And one that his older relatives remember; they lived through it.

Anam is the story of Dao's grandfather, a Catholic lawyer in South Vietnam who was imprisoned for over a decade without charge by Communists after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. But it's about more than one man: it's about an interconnected family, displaced by politics and war, and their aftermaths. It's about a yearning for Anam, a country of the mind no longer of a time or a place.

"It's interesting, you know, you kind of talk about the more distant past and how we think that, I'd say, we understand it because we kind of receive a more simplified version of it.

"And, you know, that is exactly the temptation that I think I and the narrator, we're trying to resist."

Dao's novel, in his words, draws on diverse literary traditions, different styles and different types of thinkers, forever trying to find a way to tell this story.

"I think I always knew I was writing a book," Dao says.

"I think that from the moment that I sort of discovered some parts of the family history, particularly the Amnesty International document about my grandfather being a political prisoner - from that moment, I knew I had some sense that, OK, this is big enough.

"There's something big here that probably requires something equally big and to tackle it or to do it justice. I think the slow realisation was what kind of book it was. And that took me a really long time to realise because it began as a straightforward memoir or biography."

The Melbourne-based Dao, a writer and artist, won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Award for an unpublished manuscript, recognition after a long process to craft the book.

The novel features a Dao-like narrator, raising a young child with his partner, studying and grappling with family history. A forthcoming book - understood by relatives to be the product of conversations conducted with notepad at hand - is still some way off.

Much of the action of the book takes place in university libraries and walks, while its narrator reflects on the harsh prison environment his grandfather endured and the implications for his family.

Chi Hoa is not a relic of the past but a still-functioning prison in Saigon - the city was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City after it was captured by the North Vietnamese Communist forces. It was built by the French colonial government to a design influenced by I Ching's eight trigrams. Very few people have ever managed to escape.

The grandfather of Dao's novel was a lawyer - a Catholic intellectual - in South Vietnam, imprisoned without charge or trial by the Communist government for more than a decade after the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime.

"What I realised after working on it for a long time, was that one of the things I really wanted to tackle was this tension between the fairly fundamental human yearning for a home and then what we do to create our homes, which is always sort of an act of exclusion and works through acts of forgetting either who was here before or other types of responsibilities," Dao says.

Dao says approaching family history often presented less of a cultural set of questions than a question of politics.

"So there's a particular politics of the Vietnamese diaspora and the fall of the Southern Vietnamese regime, and the kind of understandable very strong anti-communist sentiment that still is one of the defining features of that community," he says.

And he's not towing the same political lines that others writing in the '80s and '90s might have done. He acknowledges the level of nuance he can use landed those who wrote in years before him in difficulties.

Dao says his grandfather, when he was still alive, saw the project most clearly for what it was.

"I guess he was a ferocious and very widely read reader himself, and kind of understood that, maybe even before I did, what I said I was doing wasn't going to be possible," Dao says.

"I think he gave me some clues to that in terms of some of the stuff he said to me about his own attempts to write his story. ... I think there was an awareness there of something that might resist what I wanted to do when I thought that what I was doing was quite simple."

As the years went by and nothing appeared, Dao says his family assumed the project had been abandoned.

"There was sort of a middle period, I guess, where once I thought, 'OK, it's fiction', I tried to write it as a fully fictionalised novel where I kind of made up characters completely separate from my family and you're really only using them as a kind of general inspiration," Dao says.

"[Before] finally realising that the thing that would allow me to say what I needed to say, and also stay true to the original impulse to do justice to my family, was this much more hybrid form.

"So that took up to sort of seven or eight years to realise that."

It's taken some work with his parents to find the Vietnamese words to explain to his grandmother what he was doing: something not quite fiction and not just the facts. Dao says: "I have had my grandmother say early on, when she saw some of the, I think, the back cover copy, like, 'Oh, that detail is not correct about my life.'"

Despite landing on a hybrid form, Dao doesn't see his book as an advance in an artificial battle between fiction and non-fiction

"I guess I do think that the novel is this very adaptable, capacious form. And this sort of thread of ... using the novel to tackle historical events in new interesting ways, I think that is exciting," Dao says.

Dao says a touchstone for him is The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow, a novel loosely based on the execution of two accused Communist spies in the United States.

"That novel, for me, perfectly encapsulates the way the novel can pose certain 'what if?' questions in ways that really, really open up something profound about the truth of what happened and the politics of what happened and the stakes of what happened," he says.

"I kind of have thought my book is participating in that tradition."

Dao says there are international obscurations of the true history. The grandfather is unnamed. Dashes sometimes replace names. It has the effect of keeping the reader in the book, making it harder to dart back and forth between novel and historical accounts.

The voices in the book also include doubters. The narrator's partner, Lauren, expresses concern about the incessant focus on a grandfather: there were others in the family; what about a grandmother on the other side of the prison's walls? An academic supervisor, Simon, also probes at the central question of the narrator's storytelling project.

"We are always forming ourselves in response or in relation to others. And so, of course, you know, his most important or an intimate relationship is going to be a source of thinking and self formation in response to the other person," Dao says.

"I think one of the things that people have responded to has been the fact that Lauren pushes the narrator to think about his grandmother. And yeah, I think that's a nice reflection of the exact kind of blind spots we all have that, you know, being open to others, helps us to overcome."

"He's very much not self-formed because there are all these other voices sort of clamouring at him and with him in the book.

"It's a mixture of the everyday and the kind of highly abstract as well that is important. In some cases, it's a conversation with his partner. In some cases, it's a book that he finds very deep in the library, and sometimes it is sitting with his daughter at bath time.

"All of those things are relevant to this mind trying to come to terms with its own history."

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There's a curious note at the end of the novel: "Anam converses with, borrows from, remembers and forgets many traditions. Some of those traditions, and some of the authors and texts comprising those traditions, are embedded in the text. Others are only alluded to."

Does a set of notes risk giving away too much of the author's working out?

"I think that's the worry: I think of the way that that is set out in some books, it gives you the impression that if you went through that list, that you'd somehow have some kind of a key to unlocking the novel, in a way that I think short-circuits the process of what fiction actually does and why it is different from writing just an essay," Dao says.

Dao says he is not making any claims to being someone who can sit in a room and dream it all up; he says he is entirely indebted to what he has read, but repaying that debt is not as simple as inserting a bibliography.

"If I had wanted to write an essay with footnotes, I would have," he says.

"I guess that's why the notes sort of resist that full accounting, it's to try and preserve something of the unique process that the reader goes through when reading a novel."

But Anam also preserves much of the unique process Dao went through to write it, its own reward for careful reading.