The Strangers is part memoir, part speculative novel, following a writer wrestling with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet.
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About The Strangers
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?
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.
Praise for The Strangers
The Strangers is “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)
The Strangers is for “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
“An entirely new species of writing about grief. I loved this weird, warm-blooded, and inquisitive book [The Strangers].”—Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize–winning author of Birnam Wood and The Luminaries
“A multi-layered treat of a novel [The Strangers is], wise, honest, and wonderfully strange. I loved it.”—Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests
About Naomi Alderman, Author of The Strangers
Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Alderman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was chosen by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. As a video games designer, she is the cocreator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run! She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and lives in London.
You can connect with Naomi Alderman on her website and read about her on Wikipedia.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company | Hachette Book Group
ISBN Hardcover 9780316594776
Pub Date: Sep 22, 2026
LitStack Spot of Titles by Naomi Alderman and Emily St. John Mandel
We’ve found a few more LitStack Spots that you’ll definitely want to add to your TBR stack, including The Power by Naomi Alderman, The Future by Naomi Alderman, and Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.
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