Finding home

Samu cannot say which country he escaped from. If his village finds out he is gay, his family will be cut off for ever.

He is nineteen when he leaves West Africa with one certainty: staying means dying.
Ahead of him lie the desert, the traffickers, the borders, the nights in the open.
A container with a hundred and forty-three people inside. A place called Kilometre 19, where you work for months
just to pay for the next stretch of the journey.

Then, on a seafront in Tunis, on his last evening before forced repatriation, he meets an Italian man thirty years older than him - and something begins that neither of them knows what to call.

Told by Samu in his own voice, Finding Home is the story of a crossing and of an unlikely queer family: a Muslim and a Buddhist, thirty years and five thousand kilometres apart, who decided to be family.

Three hours' reading, at an unhurried pace. Long enough to understand why people leave, what a crossing really costs, and how a young man can cross a continent without losing his faith in other people.

"A parable of queer love, and of brutality that takes your breath away."
- Vanity Fair Italia, 29th July 2026 (translated from Italian)