As novels go, the pantheon of great opening sentences are invariably reserved for works which are themselves in the canon, but if the gatekeepers are unable to find room for Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers then they could at least make an exception for its first 27 words. Namely, “My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square.”

This arresting image is a suitable introduction to Sulaiman Addonia’s fantastical worldbuilding, as empathetic as it is seedy, and its protagonist Hannah. An Eritrean woman in – she thinks – her late teens, Hannah arrives in England without a passport and enters the refugee system. The resultant limbo status is treated as freeing, not restrictive, as Hannah navigates the unwritten laws of clandestine London and acts on her vivid desires – these given further context by intermittent recourse to the diary of her mother, who it seems enjoyed a similar set of healthy perversions.

The Seers has experimental qualities, notably Addonia’s choice to dispense with paragraphs entirely (I’m not convinced this adds anything structurally vital), and draws skilful equivalence between the hallucinatory and all-too-real aspects of existence in the margins. Moreover, the author, a former refugee himself, depicts a voice one rarely hears in literature or media, and certainly not talking this way.