If there is one thing that all historians must make peace with, it is that it is hard, often impossible, to know how people in the past felt. Historical fiction has the upper hand in its ability to render the complex yet plausible emotions and motivations of historical figures. Categorised by the publisher as creative nonfiction, Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers is foremost a work of imagination that sits somewhere between history and fiction. In lyrical prose, it presents the lives of five Black men: Ira Aldridge, 19th-century actor and playwright; Matthew Henson, polar explorer; Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher; footballer Justin Fashanu; and Malcolm X. Through them, the book moves from the early-19th century to the late-20th. More connects these men than race. Eshun selects moments when each one is in an exile of some kind, geographically and emotionally far away from what they once knew, questioning their place in the world, estranged in some way from their previous life.
