Nation of Strangers

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

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.

Now, Ece Temelkuran, who has for years been a political Cassandra, warning the West about the rise of fascism,
has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another. It is a book for anyone who feels
alienated by an ever-more monstrous world, and a roadmap for an uncertain future.

Review: 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
Cogent and compelling * * Times Literary Supplement * *
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 * *
This beautifully written work, which has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, is a cri de coeur from a writer making common cause with her fellow refugees. [ . . . ] A key line in her argument is that "the spread of fascism" is turning liberal people into strangers in their own countries * * Financial Times * *
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 * *

Prizes: Short-listed for Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2026 (UK).