The Strangers - by Ekow Eshun (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Moving, thoughtful, redemptive. The Strangers is an important book. It will become a Black classic."-- Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road

"Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book. Compelling and imaginatively expansive, this is something very special--creative nonfiction that inspires, stirs and challenges."--Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

A richly imaginative, powerfully empathetic, and intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men that is also a moving 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 his own right, but the representative of a type.

What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? What happens beneath the mask--what is the cost to the mind and body, to one's relationships and one's sense of self?

Searching for answers, Ekow Eshun channels the voices of five very different individuals. Each man a renowned trailblazer in his field. Each man haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each man a stranger in his own world:

Ira Aldridge, nineteenth century British actor and playwright;Matthew Henson, the first Black man to reach the North Pole;Frantz Fanon, French-Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher;Malcolm X, civil rights activist and leader;Justin Fashanu, Britain's first openly gay professional footballer.

Telling their stories, Eshun pushes the boundaries of genre to capture them in all their complexity, interweaving biography, fiction, historical record, and memoir, sharing his own experiences living as a Black Briton in the art world. The Strangers illuminates both the hostility and the beauty each man encountered in the world, positioning them all within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history, and politics throughout the diaspora.

Review Quotes

"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

"Moving, thoughtful, redemptive. The Strangers is an important book. It will become a Black classic." -- Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road

"This book is astounding. Told with a rigor 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

"An agile group biography of five remarkable figures in world history....British writer and curator Eshun delivers engaging lives of five Black men who each 'strove to reach beyond the constraints of race to assert himself as fully human, fully alive....Eshun examines these men with an eye toward placing them, in Toni Morrison's formulation, as subjects and not objects of history, 'to move from looking at the Black male figure to seeing as him.'...An inventive approach to Black lives that brings five--and many more--figures out of the shadows." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Elegant, evocative, moving - I think it's brilliant. I've never read a book like it and I'm wiser for reading it" -- Philippa Perry, author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

"The Strangers is diamantine--multifaceted, sharp and exceptionally bright. I was captivated by its vivid depiction of these five Black lives." -- Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

"Wholly unique and important, written with great compassion and intelligence in Ekow Eshun's singular, arresting style. He says things that need to be said, with a sweeping eye on history and its impact on our present." -- Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People

"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

"A beautifully written, haunting exploration of Black masculinity that pushes the boundaries of genre: part biography, part fiction, part essay, part historical record, woven together seamlessly to produce an original, rich and compelling narrative. It provides a vital insight into the importance of Black contributions to Western culture--contributions that have so often been denied. I can't praise The Strangers highly enough: its impact remains long after the final pages and it deserves to be widely read." -- Jacqueline Roy, author of The Fat Lady Sings

"Beautiful, powerful and haunting, this book defies erasure with imagination and integrity" -- Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

"This book is life-changing. I want to press it into so many hands" -- Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place

"The architecture of this book is extraordinary, the execution exceptional. A work of literary portraiture which is meticulously researched, beautifully expressed and above all moving and evocative. I was educated and enriched to the very last page" -- Charlotte Williams, author of Sugar and Slate

"Unputdownable and fiercely tender - through these five men, five masks, five mirrors, we meet ourselves. This act of docu-poetry should be required reading for all" -- Es Devlin, award-winning artist and stage designer