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The Strangers
  • Published: 17 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405983754
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

The Strangers

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
22 Sept 2026
Hardback
17 Oct 2026
EBook
17 Sept 2026
Audiobook
17 Sept 2026
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From the bestselling, Women's Prize-winning author of The Power, a wildly audacious, deeply moving new novel that follows a writer wrestling with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet

Over the year following the death of her mother, a woman grapples with the rawness of her new pain and with the older - but no less powerful - grief for the babies she lost in the preceding decades.

At the same time, a new kind of animal begins to appear, first in the UK and then gradually across the world. A little like a badger, a little like a cat, but with a long snout that leads to the nickname 'mimmoth', it's a creature both baffling and unsettling, provoking speculation, fear, rage and even devotion in the humans in which it appears to show little interest.

For the narrator, the connection she feels to the mimmoths is a solace, but maybe also a kind of madness. As the impact of the creatures begins to be felt in many different (possibly dangerous) ways she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles.
  • Published: 17 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405983754
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.
portrait photo of Naomi Alderman

Also by Naomi Alderman

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today
Penguin Readers Level 5: Doctor Who: Borrowed Time (ELT Graded Reader)
The Power
The Liars' Gospel
Doctor Who: Borrowed Time
The Lessons
Disobedience
See all

Praise for The Strangers

An entirely new species of writing about grief. I loved this weird, warm-blooded, and inquisitive book

Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood and The Luminaries

A multi-layered treat of a novel, wise, honest and wonderfully strange. I loved it

Sarah Waters

Compulsively engrossing ... draws us into an uncanny world of hurt and tenderness. Speculative fiction with brains and heart

Emma Donoghue

What a glowing, remarkable, brilliant gift of a book! Truly what the world needs now

Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is and Enormous Wings