Nation of Strangers Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction

From the internationally acclaimed Turkish author of How To Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism: A personal exploration of exile and a galvanizing new vision of home.

Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?

Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn’t happen in their country that fascism is coming.

Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise—as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can’t turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed—she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another.

Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker whose work has been published worldwide. Her novels, Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans, have been published in several languages and adapted to the stage. Temelkuran’s two political essays, Deep Mountain: Across the Armenian–Turkish Divide and Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy, explore the connection between the personal and political. After she left her country in 2016, Temelkuran began writing in English. Her first book in this language, How to Lose a Country, received international praise. Her second, Together, offers “a way out from the political and moral insanity” that is ushered by the global rise of fascism. Ece Temelkuran has lived in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, and Zagreb. She is currently based in Berlin and is on the advisory board of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.