The Strangers

£20.00

Over the year following the death of her mother, a woman grapples with the rawness of her new pain and with the older – but no less powerful – grief for the babies she lost in the preceding decades. At the same time, a new kind of animal begins to appear, first in the UK and then gradually across the world. A little like a badger, a little like a cat, but with a long snout that leads to the nickname ‘mimmoth’, it’s a creature both baffling and unsettling, provoking speculation, fear, rage and even devotion in the humans in which it appears to show little interest. For the narrator, the connection she feels to the mimmoths is a solace, but maybe also a kind of madness. As the impact of the creatures begins to be felt in many different (possibly dangerous) ways she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles.

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Description

The highly-anticipated 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

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

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.

Additional information

Weight 0.504 kg
Dimensions 22.4 × 14.5 × 2.8 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

275

Language

English

Edition

Hardback original

Dewey

823.92 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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