Review: The Strangers - Naomi Alderman

Genre: Blending Literary Fiction, Memoir/autobiographical fiction & magical realism Published: Figtree (Penguin UK), September 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars

"One sees things in the days and weeks after a death. We both thought that we might actually be going mad the first time we saw The Image of the mimmoth in my mother’s garden where she had collapsed collecting water for her orchids."

The Strangers, not unlike the fictional animal species at its center, somewhat defies taxonomy. It is part grief-memoir, part fiction meets eco-magical realism, but wholly idiosyncratic and striking as a result.

The Story:

A few months after her mother dies, our protagonists (Alderman herself) sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long trunk-like nose. Suddenly these ‘mimmoths’ are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

Suddenly, mimmoths are everywhere; infiltrating the public and political discourse on a macro-scale, and burrowing in her garden on a microscale. Our protagonist cannot shake the feeling of a personal interest and connection to these strange creatures. Have her recent losses and mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

What I loved:

The special thing about magical realism in (literary) fiction, is how it can sometimes capture an experience in a way that feels paradoxically more real than the factual recounting. Some experiences, especially major life-events, can be difficult to capture in words. Their impact may feel so far removed from the ordinary, that something needs to be added to the natural to do it justice. Something “supernatural”, in the literal sense of the word, you could say.

An intensely happy experience can feel like true magic, a traumatic event like an actual monster, a recurrent memory like a haunting. Or in this case, a series of losses can feel so disorienting that it feels like something foreign has invaded your natural environment. The magical realism metaphor becomes an extension of the true experience, beyond the facts; a sort of ultra-truth.

For me, The Strangers is the perfect example of such a story. Alderman uses the mimmoths to explore a particularly layered and complex flavour of grief. “Layered” being a key word here.

As is often the case with grief, Alderman’s is almost mycelial: it extends far below the visible surface and infiltrates everything. It’s also inherently communicative: each new bereavement will send out tendrils out to touch to neighbouring losses to create a network that can feel impossible to detangle. Alderman captures this extraordinarily well.

On a personal level, the recent loss of her mother connects to the grief over her changing relationship with her father, and a series of series of miscarriages she suffered in the previous years. These personal griefs also connect with the far more societal and systemic griefs of the post-COVID-19-era and the its political and social climate.

The mimmoths accompany us through these different layers. They are with Alderman on a personal level; a single one arriving in the garden that her mother tended around the time of her death, and setting off the chain of events. This same one appearing over and over again, and her fondness for this strange wild animal growing over the course of the story.

They are also omnipresent as an ecological phenomenon. As such, they give a glimpse into how we respond to collective grief – such as the COVID-pandemic – and how the personal and collective can compound.

If you’re new to magical realism elements in your (contemporary) fiction, I can imagine how you’d initially bounce off the mimmoths. They are undeniably strange and feel out of place in the recognizable setting of reality. To me however, that worked in favour of the metaphor. Grief to me – especially compound-grief – has often been disorienting and baffling. How can the regular world just continue on, after something so completely out of place has been added? (or in the case of the loss of a person: subtracted from it).

There’s one final characteristic that made The Strangers a standout piece of grief-literature in my book. Most books, especially autobiographical ones, stop at describing grief. Alderman goes a step further and critically explores her grief. I love this, particularly because its so incredibly difficult to do when it is your own. I cannot do this exploration justice in a short-form review, but I will mention one example that resonated particularly hard with me. Alderman questions why the grief over her mother feels so different from the grief over her miscarriages. She does so without adding a value-judgement; neither is “worse than the other”. They’re simply different. One of the factors she identifies, is its congruence with the “season of life”.

“my mother’s death was a normal thing in the normal season. She hadn’t been a young woman. She had been unwell for quite some time. The feelings were more gentle. A light spring rain. This was just how her story had gone. Now it was done.” she writes.

The death of a parent “belongs” in adulthood. The loss of multiple children does not. It makes neither worse or more valid than the other, but it does colour the experience. The Strangers dares to shine a light on that observation in a way that I find rare in grief-literature.

If it wasn’t obvious from all of the above; I really loved The Strangers and would highly recommend it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this appear in my top 10 of the year in a few months…

Many thanks to Penguin UK for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.