“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.

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.

WINNER of the Città di Lugnano Debut Novel Prize
WINNER of the Mastercard Debut Novel Prize
WINNER of the Bancarella Select Prize