The Strangers

From the bestselling, Women's Prize-winning author of The Power, a wildly audacious, deeply moving new novel that follows a writer wrestling with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet

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

'An entirely new species of writing about grief. I loved this weird, warm-blooded, and inquisitive book' Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood and The Luminaries

'A multi-layered treat of a novel, wise, honest and wonderfully strange. I loved it' Sarah Waters

'Deeply moving and wise ... A remarkably successful evocation of loss' Guardian

'A marvel of imagination and an emotional thump' Observer

'Dazzling ... beguiling ... there is so much insight on display here' Spectator

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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.