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.
Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the fifirst weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, 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.
Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the fifirst weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, 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.
Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the fifirst weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
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“Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers delivers an ode to love in poetic prose where every single act teeters between the twins of horror and beauty, and where, too, every story within a story transcends the reader. Despite the variety of ways in which one is vanquished, abroad as well as at home, Sulaiman reminds us that a thousand ways of love always—always—remain.”—Shani Mootoo, author of Polar Vortex
"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
“This is an exquisitely brilliant novel. Politically exciting and wild and beautiful. I really love young Hannah, a refugee who uses fucking as a genuinely radical act of seeing and being.”—Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers
“The violence that marks the world’s outcasts becomes, in this compelling prose, an ode to the strength to survive. What an intense and passionate book.” —Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine
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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
