“Beggars’ Banquet”, by Irina Anghel

“You have in front of you – write the editors – a book with mystery, word games, friendships and unfinished loves, the Rolling Stones and a narrator who cannot help but intervene uninvited in the story. It all starts with Mişu, a talented boy passionate about the piano, who disappears at the age of 17, on his birthday, on April 1, leaving behind an invitation to a beggars’ banquet. Forty years later, it happens that, also on April 1, Nina, a former classmate and the daughter of his piano teacher, is in the same bookstore with Mişu’s high school best friends, Nel and Victor, who is looking for a gift for him, although no one has seen him since the day of his disappearance. What follows is a story about how the places and people we lose sometimes stubbornly stay with us”.

The author, born in 1997, is a journalist at Bloomberg in London (she has a degree in political economy from King’s College London) and has a master’s degree in journalism and economic policies at Sciences Po Paris.

Irian Anghel declares: “I like detective stories, unfinished loves in fiction, secret society-type friendships, puns, the Rolling Stones and narrators who barge into the story uninvited. I ended up combining them all and what came out, I say, is a book about how the places and people we lose stubbornly stay with us.> started from an exchange of lines that I overheard in a bookstore in high school and which I then turned into a short story in which only three of the characters from the book appear (of course, one does not appear , but disappears). But the idea remained in my brain that I didn’t guess even half of what happened, actually. So I spent the next years – and especially the last months – writing and solving the problem”.

A pretext transformed into a captivating text, written in a lively, spontaneous, relaxing style. An excellent debut.

Irina Anghel – The beggars’ banquet. Polirom Publishing House. 198 pages