Overview

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.

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9781668094570

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Reviews

""Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times. To read it is 'to stiffen the sinews.'"" -- MICHAEL MORPURGO ""Nation of Strangers is essential reading--a bold reminder, a stern warning, a soft prayer and courageous song. Without doubt, Nation of Strangers is my number one favourite book of these times, navigating the truth of who we really are and who we pretend to be. It is a most exquisite narration of the sense of belonging in the unbelonging. Nation of Strangers is a critically honest observation of us, of you and me in the now and here, our fragile notion of home, the homes we leave behind, the home we carry with us. I have been walking around with Ece's book in my bag like a friend, I keep re-reading it, I feel like she is writing to me personally, teaching me to be stronger and much more resilient."" -- SALENA GODDEN ""A new book from Ece Temelkuran is a new way of understanding the world. She is lucid, honest and often wryly funny about where we are now, and who we are becoming. And Nation of Strangers is her most ambitious and dazzling book yet."" --BRIAN ENO ""Ece Temelkuran, with her beautiful, elegiac new book on becoming 'unhomed', is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt."" --YANIS VAROUFAKIS, author of Technofeudalism ""Homelessness, both literal and spiritual, is increasingly the contemporary human condition, and in Nation of Strangers, Ece Temelkuran gives it the sustained and close attention it deserves. She not only elegantly and movingly diagnoses our shared plight; she describes the wise and viable solutions we so desperately need. No one baffled and estranged by our age's relentless shocks can afford to miss this book."" --PANKAJ MISHRA, author of The World After Gaza and winner of the Weston International Award ""It's hard to believe that something as addictive as this book is also valuable medicine. Ece Temelkuran shows that homelessness spares no one. And that is precisely what forms a new basis for what we must never lose: our shared humanity."" -- EVA VON REDECKER ""Powerful, poetic and deeply personal, Nation of Strangers is both a brilliant exploration of the meaning of home and an urgent call for a new politics of togetherness. An unforgettable book that offers vital imaginative vision and vocabulary to traverse the turbulence of our times."" -- ROMAN KRZNARIC ""Temelkuran's biting portrayal of our society as a broken home is a call to action. Hers is a compelling case that a world where the ""unhomed"" are robbed of dignity is also one where nobody can truly feel settled. This book is a gift."" --DAVID WENGROW, author, with David Graeber, of The Dawn of Everything ""The dehumanisation of the unhomed would cease immediately, if every leader who leverages division for their own personal gain, were to read Ece's xray of the intimacies of exile. If proximity is the enemy of bigotry then Nation Of Strangers brought me closer than I have ever been to understanding the lived experiences of a collage of our fellow humans. The people we call migrants, refugees, and immigrants who have been forced into being untethered from their roots."" -- NIHAL ARTHANAYAKE ""There is such vital, intimate depth to Nation of Strangers, one of the finest books I've ever read on what it means to be cast out, to be unhomed. Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker, and her work here is as conceptually illuminating as it is beautifully written. More than simply an account of the global currents sweeping more and more of us into a state of what some might call exile, this is a profoundly personal meditation. In this time of rampant fascism, as a previous era's definition of home grows ever more distant, Nation of Strangers is both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone."" -- OMAR EL AKKAD, author of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Author Information

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.

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