The Strangers

In a paranoid nation on the other side of the world a young man named Noon is caught vandalizing posters of the Beloved President. Nearer by, Oon trawls designer shops hoping to find just the right shirt to wear to an upcoming gig. Noona and friends screen their low-budget film at hat shops and dive bars, hoping for a break. And Oona works a missing-persons case on a giant cruise ship. In Eugene Lim's beautifully bizarre new novel, multiple sets of strange twins explode or drift or otherwise come apart and yet, like entangled quanta, continue to speak impossibly to one another. What an astonishing book! ­Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication. –Harry Mathews THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure. –Susan Daitch Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale. –Lydia Davis