From Another World | Granta

  • Published: 07/10/2021
  • ISBN: 9781783786671
  • Granta Books
  • 256 pages

From Another World

Evelina Santangelo

Translated by Ruth Clarke

In a discount store in Brussels, 15-year-old Khaled stands oozing water from his trainers, mud caked on his legs. He is spotted by Karolina. She offers him a packet of biscuits, but what he wants is a red suitcase. She buys it for him and they part ways: Karolina to mourn her missing son, whose laptop history is filled with visits to extremist websites; Khaled to trek down to Sicily, travelling against the flow of other Syrian refugees, on a journey of mysterious but urgent intent…

The seas around Italy and Sicily are filled with drowning migrants; the country is filled with xenophobia and fear. In the cities and towns, in the schools and shops, in the streets and fields, strange children are starting to appear – enigmatic, unnerving presences who disappear like ghosts, causing uproar. When the media starts circulating an image of a bizarre dark-skinned boy pulling a red suitcase, who appears in various locations throughout the country, paranoia hits a fever pitch. The phantasmal children just keep coming.

At once a ghost story, a morality tale, a quest narrative and a deeply affecting reflection on loss, grief and the struggle to brave love in blackened times, From Another World is a masterwork of writing from one of Sicily’s most important writers.

Dark fiction at its best. Haunted and deeply political, From Another World reads like a nightmare, with Europe plagued by xenophobia, awash with lost children and restless ghosts

Mariana Enriquez

Translated by Ruth Clarke with scrupulous care over its different registers, it is an ambitious, unsettling novel... Santangelo's disparate characters interlink in a sometimes overwhelming, always meaningful expression of despair and humanity

Irish Times

[Santangelo] channels the horror genre, giving a surreal slant to her vision of the "migrant crisis"... [she] injects an uncanny element

TLS

The Author

Evelina Santangelo is an author and translator. She has won the 2000 Premio Franciacorta, Premio Mondello, Premio Fiesole Narrativa and the Premio Berto, as well as being a finalist for the Premio Chiara. She is the author of six novels, of which From Another World is the first to be published in English. She lives in Palermo.

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The Translator

Ruth Clarke is a translator from Spanish, French and Italian, whose translations include Cristina Caboni’s The Secret Ways of Perfume. She is a founding member of The Starling Bureau, a collective of literary translators.

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Evelina Santangelo on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

From Another World

Evelina Santangelo

An excerpt from the novel From Another World, translated from the Italian by Ruth Clarke.