We encounter their struggles by way of a series of rotating, short first-person chapters, each spoken from the perspective of a different character. Into this unlovely terrain, Ananda Devi inserts a handful of teenagers – Eve, Saadiq, Clélio, Savita – who are struggling to survive, and in some cases, flourish, in circumstances that are both brutal and brutalising.

So they go and hunt, like the hundreds of feral dogs raging through the city and tearing it apart.” According to them, most females carry the same heaviness: this hole that is an impassable yet open door that keeps its secrets. They spread a pool of oil around them, in which their bored faces and their footsteps are reflected. If you care about your life, your body, if you’re a girl, if you’re old, you’d do best to give them a wide berth. The boys swear oaths, declare rules, make alliances: a pack mentality. As Eve, the most prominent of the book’s four main characters, puts it at the start of the novel: “There’s a guard at the end of each street. Most of this atmosphere is generated by the city’s men (when is it not?). It is an environment, based on a penurious district of the city known as Troumaron, that is steadily oppressive, potent with agitation, pulsingly sinister, pervasively menacing.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is a spare, traumatic and enriching novel, newly and superbly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, which takes place in the city of Port Louis on the island-nation of Mauritius.

Eve out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi