NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

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. 

TARGET READERSHIP
- For readers of the new wave Italian women writers like Elena Ferrante, Donatella di Pietrantonio, Claudia Durastanti, and Nadia Terranova
- For readers of “homegoing” and reckoning-with-family-legacy novels, like: In the Country of Others by Leïla Slimani (Penguin, 2021); Homesick by Jennifer Croft (Bloomsbury, 2022); The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah; Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti; The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman (Scribner, 2021); Good Girl by Aria Aber

KEY SELLING POINTS
- UNIQUE CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: Anechoum and her protagonist are daughters of Moroccan refugees.
- POLITICALLY & CULTURALLY RELEVANT: With its theme of finding identity and displacement, the story is in conversation with the political/cultural moment.