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The Strangers
  • Published: 17 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241777664
  • Imprint: Fig Tree
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $55.00

The Strangers

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
22 Sept 2026
Hardback
17 Oct 2026
EBook
17 Sept 2026
Audiobook
17 Sept 2026
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From the bestselling, Women's Prize-winning author of The Power, a wildly audacious, deeply moving new novel that follows a writer wrestling with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet

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.
  • Published: 17 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241777664
  • Imprint: Fig Tree
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $55.00
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About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.
portrait photo of Naomi Alderman

Also by Naomi Alderman

Penguin Readers Level 5: Doctor Who: Borrowed Time (ELT Graded Reader)
Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today
The Power
Disobedience
The Liars' Gospel
Doctor Who: Borrowed Time
The Lessons
See all

Praise for The Strangers

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

What a glowing, remarkable, brilliant gift of a book! Truly what the world needs now

Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is and Enormous Wings

A profoundly strange and deeply marvellous book about grief. It's been pure joy to live for a while inside Naomi Alderman's brain

Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman:

Alderman has gone from promising young author to publishing phenomenon, a writer gifted with the double Midas touch of commercial success and literary prestige

Sunday Times

Her most personal work yet ... A must-read for anyone who has ever loved and lost

Harper's Bazaar

In the same way that a gravestone is an attempt to give form to an absence, Alderman’s structural ingenuity allows the reader to wrangle some of the ineffable aspects of grief into something more coherent and bounded

Guardian

Deeply moving and wise ... A remarkably successful evocation of loss

Guardian

Dazzling ... beguiling ... there is so much insight on display here: on illness, womanhood and grief

The Spectator

'Utterly compelling ... I love [Naomi's] writing, I love her mind'

Nigella Lawson

Bold and uncompromising ... interrogates pain at the source without searching for a neat encapsulation ... the result is something wonderful

Irish Times