Many first novels are really first published novels, reactions to the angsty roman à clefs and 700-page epics that preceded them (now mercifully forgotten in a drawer). But this was not the case for Pajtim Statovci. My Cat Yugoslavia – which has already won gushing praise from the New York Times (“a marvel, a remarkable achievement”) and New Yorker (“strange and exquisite”) – is not only the first novel he tried to write, but the first piece of fiction he ever wrote.

“I was working in a grocery store while simultaneously studying comparative literature at the University of Helsinki,” he says. “One night, after a late shift, frustrated and fed up with my job, I asked myself: what am I waiting for?” Eighteen months later, at just 21 years old, he had finished the first draft of My Cat Yugoslavia. But while Statovci the author, multilingual, bookishly handsome and improbably successful for his age – he’s now 27 – may make writing look easy, it took a turbulent childhood to get him here.

He was born in Kosovo in 1990, a mere year before the first of the many Yugoslav wars broke out, and had dreamed of being a writer since boyhood: “As a child, I was sensitive and fragile to the point where I actually pretended that I was in the stories I consumed, that I led the life of their protagonists because the life in fiction was so much more interesting than [the one] I was living.”

Although Statovci assures me that his novel “is a work of fiction from start to finish”, he admits to including some autobiographical elements. Like one of his protagonists, Emine, he fled his home for Finland with his family. His observations on nationality, racism and migration come from his own experience, as well as the people around him. Bekim, his other protagonist, talks at length about growing up as an Albanian migrant in Finland. “One day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you more,” he recalls his father saying about Finns.

My Cat Yugoslavia is made up of two stories: one is a magical realist tale that follows a young, gay man – Bekim – and his relationship with a boorishly humanoid talking cat. The other, about Emine, is a realist portrayal of an Albanian mother who flees to Finland with her family during the 1980s. Bekim is Emine’s child, though you would hardly realise it from their interactions. “Oftentimes there’s a gap between the younger … and the older generation in families that have migrated from one culture to another. And sometimes there’s no solution to be found, no dialogue, no understanding,” Statovci says. “And the gap gets only bigger and deeper, and the distance between two worlds only grows longer, never closing up.”

Oppression and discrimination are very much alive in our world. Only the victims of them keep changing Pajtim Statovci

Magical realism, Statovci says, “doesn’t care about walls, and it doesn’t have constraints, whereas the reality does. It has rules, norms and codes of conduct.” After their initial meeting in a gay club, Bekim’s cat companion is abrasive, homophobic, bigoted – but Bekim thinks the love he gets from the cat is stronger and more powerful because of the boundaries it has crossed. Through fantasy, Statovci expresses the troubled inner life of Bekim – though this isn’t to say that Emine’s sections are any less lyrical; when performing chores, she remarks that “in a clean house, there were no secrets”. But in those passages, the lyricism lies in how events are presented. In Bekim’s surreal story, what happens is just as fantastic as how it’s told.

Reality and fantasy aren’t entirely separate for Statovci, either. “Many things in my childhood and in my life, such as the war in Kosovo, did not make sense to me. They just were fenced outside my understanding,” he says. “I guess this is the reason I’ve always been drawn to works of fiction that make the unimaginable possible and the unbelievable understandable.”

So why a talking cat? When writing the novel, Statovci became interested in the relationship between animals and humans, particularly how the latter project their own feelings onto their beastly companions, anthropomorphising them. “Reading animals as symbols of us reduces them, [it] violates their right to represent themselves,” he says. Depending on the culture, animals can symbolise completely different things, he says: “In Finland, cats are domesticated animals, whereas in Kosovo they are seen as dirty.”

In this sense, animals fall foul of the same cultural stereotyping as humans. “We live in a world pierced with animal cruelty, racism, prejudice and stereotypes. Oppression and discrimination have always been, and are to this day, very much alive in our world. Only the victims of them keep changing.”

Statovci isn’t too concerned about his own national identity. “I don’t go to sleep at night thinking about my relationship to the country I was born in,” he says. “I speak Albanian as my mother tongue, but I don’t use it when I think, write or dream.” In his novel, however, Bekim’s Albanian grandfather holds precisely those concerns, worrying that “one day [Bekim] won’t be an Albanian at all but something else all together.” There is also a wonderfully plain line where the cat decides he “no longer wanted to be a cat; he wanted to be a film director”. Statovci treats species and occupation as one and the same: both are roles we must play.

While second-generation migrants are often robbed of a national “home”, considered foreign in both their adopted country and their family’s homeland, Statovci considers home “a state of mind”. “When I write, that’s home to me,” he says. “That’s the great thing about fiction – its ability to resonate inside everyone.” That is what appealed to Statovci the boy. It is also what he gives back in My Cat Yugoslavia.