This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The Strangers will be released on September 22, 2026.
Naomi Alderman is an author I’d heard a lot about but never read, so when I saw she had a new novel coming out—even one in which she herself is the main character—I thought it was the perfect opportunity to give her work a try, and I picked up a copy of The Strangers.
The Strangers is written in first-person from the perspective of author Naomi Alderman, who at one point in the text claims to be writing a book that’s part novel and part memoir. While The Strangers is clearly a work of speculative fiction, I imagine there’s a whole lot of the author’s real history interspersed with the fictional elements. I’m not going to snoop into her personal life, but it has the ring of a novel with a lot of the personal.
At any rate, the book version of Alderman has recently lost her mother and is spending a lot of time with an ailing father when they catch a glimpse of a strange, furry creature that doesn’t quite look like anything native to the British Isles—or indeed to anywhere on Earth. That sighting proves to be the first of many, as the creatures dubbed mimmoths begin to emerge all over the world. And while they seem benign enough…well, that might not matter to the discourse.
Let me say up front that this isn’t a novel that’s interested in explaining the mimmoths. For certain, there’s plenty of theorizing and investigation, but if you’re looking for outright answers, you’re going to be left wanting. It’s much more an exploration of how people behave in the face of the inexplicable, and perhaps even more than that, of the small ways in which the grieving can take comfort.
The narrator’s complicated feelings toward her mother—who both loved her and failed her in very human ways before succumbing to one of her long-term maladies—is a theme from the very start, but there’s also plenty of space dedicated to the joy of exploration. The mimmoths aren’t scary, but they are endlessly fascinating, only becoming more so as the world struggles to determine their origins and succeeds in learning about their intelligence and environmental impact. Their appearance is a compelling distraction and often a soothing one, even for a lead in the midst of grief.
But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more fragmented, even as it partially unifies around the theme of fertility. The narrator shares details of her long and heart-wrenching history of miscarriage, and a handful of online voices begin to trace a line between infertility and the appearance of the mimmoths. All of it is tied up with political debates, conspiracy theories, unlikely videos from web streamers, and more. As an exploration of how the world will react to the inexplicable, it’s compelling. And there are some interesting thematic meditations on humanity and its assumptions about its role in the animal kingdom. But even as it muses on humanity and digs into the emotions surrounding fertility, it feels a bit aimless in the back half. In a memoir—notably not a plot-heavy genre—perhaps that’s not a negative. But approaching as a reader expecting a science fiction novel, it’s lacking a touch of cohesion, even when it’s digging into interesting meditations on personal loss or societal responses to the inexplicable.
On the whole, The Strangers makes for a compelling and personal read that has a whole lot to say about humanity on both the micro and macro level. It doesn’t quite come together in a way that would place it among my favorites of the year, but I’m still glad to have picked it up!
Recommended if you like: memoir, social commentary, magical realism.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2026 and features Politics. I believe the mimmoth story fits the parameters for First Contact, although it’s certainly not played to genre expectations.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.