THE STRANGERS

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 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 experie