The Seers
Sulaiman Addonia
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Recommended by Victoria
‘Hannah arrives in London as a teenage refugee from Eritrea with only the diary of her dead mother and memories of war-torn family life. She has to navigate the faceless UK asylum system, first in a foster home in Kilburn and then on the streets and parks of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury. This is also where Hannah discovers her own and her parents’ subversive desires. The Seers is a short and powerful novel – by turns sexy, enraging, saddening – that also asks of the reader why it is that we so often insist on comparing, measuring and weighing incommensurable sufferings.’
From the publisher
The Seers is an urgent and empowering novel, following the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, the novel moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, presenting gender-fluid, trans and androgynous African immigrants, and insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.
‘The Seers is an incandescent howl of anti-colonial rage and insatiable desire; a powerful and taboo-breaking love letter to a London made of stories, and a scathing indictment of the UK asylum system’s ability to break hearts and bodies to pieces again and again.’ – Preti Taneja
‘A unique & intelligent voice which makes sensual evocative poetry of the deepest, fiercest emotions.’ – The Big Issue