Tangerinn

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. (Jan.)