Tangerinn
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
New York Times and Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
“Italian literature has been waiting years for a novel like this.”—Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection
A luminous debut about the search for belonging, the tension between departure and return, and the legacy of migration, Tangerinn is a novel of memory, a stirring meditation on culture, identity, and inheritance set between London and the windswept beaches of southern Italy.
Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar—it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina’s sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive.
In searching for traces of her father, Mina begins to piece together her own fractured sense of identity. As she reconnects with the memories embedded in the land, she must confront what it means to belong—not just to a place, but to a lineage, a language, a self.
With precise, sensual prose and an acute sensitivity to atmosphere and emotion, Anechoum delivers a novel that is at once tender and fierce, local and borderless, as intimate as it is political.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anechoum debuts with the earnest story of an Italian woman exploring her Moroccan roots in the wake of her father's death. At the novel's outset, Mina, 29, listlessly works in London as an administrative assistant for a fast-food chain and lives with a wealthy social media influencer who makes her feel inferior. After Mina's Moroccan-born father, Omar, dies, she returns to her family's home on the southern Italian coast for the first time in six years. As Mina helps plan Omar's memorial, she attempts to repair her fractured relationship with her perpetually distracted and childlike Italian mother, Berta, and hangs around her father's bar, the Tangerinn, where her older sister, Aisha, has been working. There, she meets Nazim, a Turkish expat who mingles with the rest of the Tangerinn's foreign clientele, and the pair strike up a romance. The predictable plot sees Mina come to terms with her loss and find a sense of purpose, but Anechoum imbues the narrative with a sense of intimacy via Mina's direct addresses to Omar ("You died on a random day and, like on any other random day, I wasn't there. Between us there were two thousand kilometers and all the things left unsaid"). This is worth a look.