The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

“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.