Summary

The prologue of Tangerine is in the present tense and narrated in the first-person by an unnamed woman, who sits alone in a nondescript hospital in Spain. She imagines three men pulling a body from water, then sitting with their thoughts afterward as they wait for the police. She returns to this image often as she sits before the window. Her empty days are filled with this and other memories of Tangier. In all of them, “she” (2) is there, a frightening, hazy spectre. A redheaded nurse enters and attempts to spoon-feed the woman, but she refuses, feeling frozen despite the summer heat.

In Chapter 1, the novel abruptly changes scene to Tangier, 1956, a Tuesday, market day. Alice Shipley’s inner thoughts are conveyed in the first-person and in past tense. She dreaded having to go out into the chaos of the market, where the Rif...