Granta signs Evelina Santangelo's 'powerful' novel

Granta Books has acquired award-winning Sicilian author Evelina Santangelo's powerful novel, From Another World.

Editor Ka Bradley bought world English language rights from Alice Canosi at Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency. Granta Books will publish in summer 2021.

Translated from Da un altro mondo in Italian, the book follows Khaled, a young migrant making an urgent but mysterious journey from Brussels to Palermo, carrying a red suitcase; and Karolina, whose son, suspected of links with extremist organisations, has inexplicably disappeared.

“The backdrop of their stories is a contemporary Europe bristling with ethno-nationalism, sinking into right-wing politics, haunted by the refugees who are left to drown off the coasts,” the synopsis reads. “These hauntings become literal when strange children start to appear in schools across Italy. Are they unaccompanied minors, or ghosts from another world?”

Acquiring editor Ka Bradley said: “From Another World combines narrative momentum and wire-taut tension with an urgent, affecting meditation on our role in the migrant crisis. Evelina Santangelo’s work of ‘refugee gothic’ is a superb supernatural ghost story, but like all good ghost stories, its real darkness comes from the truths it reveals about our societies and our selves. It is a necessary novel from an author working at the height of her powers, and I am delighted that we are publishing her work in English for the first time.”

Santangelo is an author and translator. She has won a number of prizes, s the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. She lives between Palermo and Turin.