Sulaiman Addonia’s novel is quietly extraordinary. Narrated by Hannah, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, the novel tells the story of her arrival and gradual assimilation in London. This assimilation is geographical, psychological, and sexual. Sex is the key to unlocking her identity as a person and as a Londoner. In this sense it is a coming-of-age story, reminiscent of tales as old as Diderot’s The Nun. The author also acknowledges Declos and Bataille in his closing notes, and their influence is transparent. However, the sex in Hannah’s tale is never licentious, rather it is part of her interrogation of who she is, and a means of coming to terms with her history. Her mother died when she was two, but she has inherited her diaries, which are in themselves disconcertingly explicit. All of this helps in the construction of the asylum seeker character who is so often othered, but whose voice here, in all its coherence and incoherence, feels completely believable. The novel has no paragraph breaks, permitting a stream of consciousness as the narrator rotates through her thoughts, memories and fears. The book skips through time, with the present never completely apparent. It is also a turbulent ode to London itself: from Fitzroy Square to Kilburn, from the joys of the city to the loneliness of sitting in a room watching Jubilee Line trains full of people full of purpose going about their lives going past the window.
“I had fled a city in a war zone to another engaged in a different kind of conflict, a city full of people in a fight with their feelings and thoughts.”
“But who are we, I thought, if we don’t savour our ridiculousness, our madness, in the way we embrace sanity? Everything passes, love remains. The rain in Fitzroy Square intensified.”
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