The Seers
Sulaiman Addonia
With echoes of Zora Neale-Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
In the squares of Bloomsbury, near an orphanage in Kilburn, a young Eritrean refugee named Hannah grapples with a disturbing sexual story in her mother’s diary. As Hannah moves through the UK asylum system haunted by this tale, language becomes a tool of survival and time becomes a placid lake in which the Home Office drowns her.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, Sulaiman Addonia's The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of one life among thousands. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the endless bureaucracy of immigration, the West is both savior and abuser, refuge from and original cause of harm, seeking always to shape her—but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
Sulaiman Addonia
With echoes of Zora Neale-Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
In the squares of Bloomsbury, near an orphanage in Kilburn, a young Eritrean refugee named Hannah grapples with a disturbing sexual story in her mother’s diary. As Hannah moves through the UK asylum system haunted by this tale, language becomes a tool of survival and time becomes a placid lake in which the Home Office drowns her.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, Sulaiman Addonia's The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of one life among thousands. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the endless bureaucracy of immigration, the West is both savior and abuser, refuge from and original cause of harm, seeking always to shape her—but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
Sulaiman Addonia
With echoes of Zora Neale-Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
In the squares of Bloomsbury, near an orphanage in Kilburn, a young Eritrean refugee named Hannah grapples with a disturbing sexual story in her mother’s diary. As Hannah moves through the UK asylum system haunted by this tale, language becomes a tool of survival and time becomes a placid lake in which the Home Office drowns her.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, Sulaiman Addonia's The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of one life among thousands. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the endless bureaucracy of immigration, the West is both savior and abuser, refuge from and original cause of harm, seeking always to shape her—but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
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"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."—London Review Bookshop
"I loved The Seers. Addonia's writing is full of energy that engages the whole body. The voice is vivid, alive and real. It has elements of my favourite writers in it; I thought of Albert Camus, Claude Mckay, Junot Diaz and Binyavanga Wainaina while reading it. Brutal and tender in equal measure."—Raymond Antrobus, award-winning poet and author
“The Seers is a knockout. A complex novel of generational history, trauma, eroticism… Not only is this a novel that needs to be read now—its ambition, humanity, anger and an unforgettable narrator mark it out as a classic.”—Niven Govinden, award-winning author of Diary of a Film
"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, award-winning author of We That Are Young and Aftermath
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Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and in his early teens he lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019, Graywolf, 2020), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia’s essays have appeared in LitHub, Granta, Freeman’s, New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020, edited by John Freeman) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020, edited by Maaza Mengiste). Sulaiman Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile (AALFIE), selected in 2022 as one of the top 40 literary festivals in the world. In 2021 he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro Artistic Award for Literature and in 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of Royal Society of Literature (RSL).
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Publication date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781998336098
eISBN: 9781998336104
Paperback: 144 pages
