LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2025
LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025
Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home.
''Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book'' Bernardine Evaristo
''Luminous and extraordinary... This book will be referenced for years to come'' Lemn Sissay
In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type.
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask?
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldrid
