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

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2025LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025Richly 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 SissayIn 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: