Strangers

<p>"Moving, thoughtful, redemptive. The Strangers is an important book. It will become a Black classic."-- Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road</p> <p>"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</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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:</p> <ul> <li>Ira Aldridge, nineteenth century British actor and playwright;</li> <li>Matthew Henson, the first Black man to reach the North Pole;</li> <li>Frantz Fanon, French-Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher;</li> <li>Malcolm X, civil rights activist and leader;</li> <li>Justin Fashanu, Britain's first openly gay professional footballer.</li> </ul> <p>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.</p>