The Strangers

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home

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 Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.

Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

'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

©2024 Ekow Eshun (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

A generous gift . . .The author inhabits the perspective of five figures, from Malcolm X to footballer Justin Fashanu, in this lyrical account of their lives, a thrilling affront to the archives that exclude them . . . Each chapter is absorbing, no matter how much you already know about each person
Observer
Mesmerising. A book of creative non-fiction centred on important Black historical figures... Ekow Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly to life
Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2024)
An extraordinary feat of empathy. Innovative [and] intimate... this book is an act of rapprochement rendered with great emotional intelligence and tenderness. Remarkable
Guardian
One for the intellectually curious. Eshun mixes biography and imagination to craft essays based on the lives of five Black men from history. Interspersed with thoughts about the author's own experiences as a Black man, the stories cross generations, and form part of a wider narrative about race, culture and historical amnesia
Observer (Books of the Year 2024)
Ekow Eshun is a genius. He holds a torch where institutions have refused to look and helps us all to see through shadows to the magnificent strangers. His writings on the Black aesthetic are unsurpassed – and my world is a better place because he is writing in it. This book will be referenced for years to come
Lemn Sissay, author of 'My Name is Why'
This book is astounding. Told with a rigour and intimacy that only Ekow Eshun could conjure… In a world where Blackness is synonymous with death, The Strangers portrays scenes of beauty, of fullness – of just what it means to be alive'
Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of 'Open Water'
Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book. Ekow Eshun resurrects five pioneering figures, connecting them thematically to each other while constantly recalibrating the contexts around them, revealing wider global histories, cultures and patterns of power. Compelling and imaginatively expansive, this is something very special – creative non-fiction that inspires, stirs and challenges the reader
Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of 'Girl, Woman, Other'
Beautiful, powerful and haunting, this book defies erasure with imagination and integrity
Afua Hirsch, author of 'Brit(ish)'
Staggering. Outside of Baldwin himself, I can’t think of a creative approach to critique that hit me as hard as this. The storytelling, the archival work, the erudition and research behind it, the capacity for invention (down to the use of dialogue), and—one of my favourite aspects of this book—its singular, inventive use of form. It’s rare to read a book that’s so invigorating, intervening with freshness and new clarity in longstanding conversations; and that gives you such a striking new way of describing and seeing your own world. If this doesn’t become a classic, then I don’t know what ever could
Jason Allen-Paisant, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of 'Self-Portrait as Othello'
The Strangers is diamantine – multifaceted, sharp and exceptionally bright. I was captivated by its vivid depiction of these five Black lives
Doireann Ní Ghríofa

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