Tangerinn

The novel for a displaced generation Mina is thirty years old and leads a life in London built with great care and little spontaneity, in a frantic attempt to finally feel “right”. One evening she receives a phone call from her mother: her father has died. Mina returns home for the funeral, but ends up staying. Home is a small seaside town where her Moroccan father ran a beach bar frequented mostly by immigrants, a place of refuge for those who didn’t feel welcome in this new land.It’s here, in a place that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone, and where people too often appear like ghosts who pass and vanish, that Mina finds her family, and the memories of her father: the mythical, elusive, eternal migrant with a mysterious past. Here, Mina will discover that roots are just a fleeting dream, a desire to find oneself in a common history and shared affection that allows us to forget, at least at times, the ferocity of the world and the wounds of abandonment. 

Emanuela Anechoum was born in Reggio Calabria in 1991 and lives in Rome. After her studies, she started working in the publishing world in London and later moved to Italy. She has written for Vice, Doppiozero, Marvin Rivista. Tangerinn, winner of the Selezione Bancarella 2024 Prize, is her first novel. Lucy Rand is a literary translator and copy-editor, from Italian to English. Her translations include Laura Imai Messina’s The Phonebox at the Edge of the World, and Camille de Peretti’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman. She has been shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize.