Awards

• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2026 (UK)

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781837262021

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for How to Lose a Country and Together: 'Highly readable and vibrates with outrage * * The Times * * Temelkuran is a brilliant writer, finding humour, hope and humanity in the darkest corners of our current malaise -- BRIAN ENO A brilliant analysis . . . It's one of the most important books anyone could read at the moment -- PHILIP PULLMAN An obligatory book for any human on earth today -- ANDREW SEAN GREER

Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times -- MICHAEL MORPURGO 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 -- OMAR EL AKKAD Ece Temelkuran, with her beautiful, elegiac new book on becoming ""unhomed"", is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt -- YANIS VAROUFAKIS 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 Crackling with intelligence, insight and generosity -- KAMILA SHAMSIE Temelkuran is a writer of rare gifts with an urgent message . . . A book you'll ignore at your peril * * Spectator * * Turkish author Ece Temelkuran writes powerfully. Fans of Elif Shafak's non-fiction and Sally Hayden's writing will find a lot to love here * * Irish Independent * * Her most personal [book] yet. Nation of Strangers is structured as a series of confiding, stirring letters addressed to the reader. Collectively, they conjure a roadmap for unity in uncertain times, rooted in [Temelkuran's] lived experience of being ""unhomed"" * * Nerve * * Essential reading for this month, this year, this era -- CAROLINE SANDERSON, , 'Non-Fiction Book of the Month' * * Bookseller * * Letter by letter, Nation of Strangers becomes something rarely found in contemporary political literature: a grand essay that in no way glorifies the hardships of modern history, yet neither abandons them, and that draws a paradoxically comforting form of belonging from this uprooting . . . Anyone who reads this book immediately feels less alone. And that is surprisingly helpful at a time when we all stare, paralysed with anxiety, into a future of farewells -- DANIEL KEHLMANN

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. ecetemelkuran.net | @ETemelkuran | @ece.temelkuran

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