The Strangers

The highly-anticipated audacious new novel from the Women's Prize-winning author of The Power.

They had come from nowhere, and now they were everywhere

A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long trunk-like nose. Suddenly these ‘mimmoths’ are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief – a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.

Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.

Review

Compulsively engrossing ... draws us into an uncanny world of hurt and tenderness. Speculative fiction with brains and heart ― Emma Donoghue

Alderman has created something curious, messy and unexpectedly comforting ... her wit and dazzling, inquiring intellect blaze out ― Financial Times

Bold and uncompromising ... interrogates pain at the source without searching for a neat encapsulation ... the result is something wonderful ― Irish Times

What a glowing, remarkable, brilliant gift of a book! Truly what the world needs now ― Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is and Enormous Wings

A profoundly strange and deeply marvellous book about grief. It's been pure joy to live for a while inside Naomi Alderman's brain ― Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman:

The most profound book I have ever read on the subject of grief (as well as being a deeply absorbing and often funny novel). I felt such a pang to reach the end ― Bee WIlson

'Utterly compelling ... I love [Naomi's] writing, I love her mind' ― Nigella Lawson

About the Author

Naomi Alderman has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and another one in Classical Studies. Also an MA in Creative Writing and another MA in Classics. She's an award-winning novelist, broadcaster, TV producer and videogames creator. She has worked in technology startups for more than 20 years, since the time when people in tech still felt utopian about "making the world a better place". Which now makes her feel slightly embarrassed about her naivety. She is the author of the bestselling, multi-award-winning The Power, which was chosen as a book of the year by both Bill Gates and Barack Obama and became a TV series for Amazon Prime. Her other books include The Future, The Liars’ Gospel, The Lessons and Disobedience She is the co-creator of the fitness game and audio adventure Zombies, Run! which has more than ten million players. Naomi writes and presents Human Intelligence, a history of thinking on BBC Radio 4.