Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers is an unusual and deeply thoughtful blend of memoir and speculative fiction that uses the arrival of a mysterious new species to explore grief, human nature, and the unsettling realization that the world keeps going even when your own world has changed forever.
A few months after the death of her mother, novelist Naomi Alderman installs a wildlife camera in the garden of her parents’ home. What it captures is something no one has seen before: a strange, badger-sized animal with a flat face and a long, trunk-like nose. Soon these creatures, called mimmoths, are appearing everywhere. They spread across the United Kingdom and then around the world, seemingly without explanation. They don’t behave like ordinary animals. They won’t take food from humans, they can’t be captured, and they seem to possess an intelligence and purpose of their own.
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