Ever wondered what is it like to be an immigrant- without a home in a world where people with home make the rules? Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction from the internationally acclaimed Turkish Ece Tmelkuran 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 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 temperature 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. This book is 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. Temelmuran born in 1973, left Turkey in 2016 fearing repression from the authoritarian regime of president Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan with her 2019 work How to lose a country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship.

“The spread of fascism” is turning liberal people into strangers in their own countries – making them as alienated as immigrants. We are all being unhomed… we are many – so many that if were to add up all of us, we might even form the majority. The disgust of having survived and of having had to conform. To keep quiet at racist remarks, for example. We educate ourselves to swallow anger for we learn it is the express way to being undesirable. Berlin is an organism made of strangers.” she writes. She doesn’t cover up either her defeats or her past curelties.

Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21^st Century by Ece Temelkuran, Canongate £18.99/Scribner Canada $36.99, 256 pages.