- Addonia is an award-winning, highly acclaimed author, whose personal story as a child refugee underlies all of his writing, offering a vital and eye-opening perspective on the experiences of refugess and asylum-seekers.
- The Seers is revelatory in its exploration of the sexual life of refugees, bringing great depth and humanity to its narrator's story, offering an entirely new, and deeply empowering, perspective.
- The book will appeal to a very wide readership, through addressing so many different themes: London, immigration, sexuality, queerness, the importance of poetry and literature.
The Seers follows the first years of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. 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.
Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees.