The Strangers

A transcendent novel from the bestselling author of The Power: A writer wrestles with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet.

“Powerful and emotional while being both whimsical and grounded, this wholly original blend of memoir and fiction will resonate deeply.” (Booklist, starred review)

They came from nowhere, and now they are 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.

• "Alderman spins an engrossing tale that is ultimately about the fog of grief, an M. Night Shyamalan film in book form.”
  TIME
• “The Strangers sounds like two books in one, but it isn’t: the mimmoth arrival and the oddness it brings—uncertainty, a new perspective, the closing of one life and the opening of another—all fit perfectly with the confusions of grief and the paths leading through it.”
  The Times of London
• “Strange and wonderful…The Strangers is [Alderman's] most personal work yet…A must-read for anyone who has ever loved and lost.”
  Harper's Bazaar UK
• "The Strangers is a deeply moving and wise book, asserting the painful truth that we simply do not get to choose the things that we lose."
  The Guardian
• "Beguiling…there is so much insight on display here: on illness, womanhood and grief…a strange, dazzling book."
  The Spectator (UK)
• “Powerful and emotional while being both whimsical and grounded, this wholly original blend of memoir and fiction will resonate deeply with readers.”
  Booklist (starred review)
• "Fans of Margaret Atwood, Mona Awad, Emily St. John Mandel, and Sarai Walker will appreciate the raw weirdness that is also always authentic and real in this not-so-far-afield dystopian take on women’s bodies and the memories enfolded in them."
  Library Journal (starred review)
• “Compulsively engrossing, The Strangers draws us into an uncanny world of hurt and tenderness. Speculative fiction with brains and heart.”
  Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Paris Express
• “A multi-layered treat of a novel, wise, honest, and wonderfully strange. I loved it.”
  Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests
• “An entirely new species of writing about grief. I loved this weird, warm-blooded, and inquisitive book.”
  Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize–winning author of Birnam Wood and The Luminaries
• “What a glowing, remarkable, brilliant gift of a book! Naomi Alderman has outdone herself. Truly, The Strangers is what the world needs now. I will be shouting its praises from the rooftops.”
  Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is and Enormous Wings
• “I cannot get over how brilliant The Strangers is—I loved it so much. Naomi Alderman puts into words the many amorphous feelings that wander about the body, and she does it so enjoyably. The book is beautiful, compelling, haunting, funny, clever—but it’s also so precise on pain and the lie of closure. To The Strangers, I say a giant YES.”
  Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing and The Echoes