A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Soon the “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to “mimmoth psychosis”? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the crosscurrents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Simultaneously, she negotiates the territory of grief—a place with its own logic and rhythms. As she observes the Jewish rituals for mourning a parent, she also endures the pain of recurrent miscarriages, which exists without a formal grieving structure. From these losses, she reckons with her family’s history and her own Jewish upbringing—asking how, in fraught times, we connect to the world around us and to ourselves.

 The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the line between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human.