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Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century
by Ece Temelkuran
From the internationally acclaimed Turkish 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 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.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (5/21/2026)
Non-fiction feels like it is becoming more miss than hit for me lately. I tried (without knowing much about it) reading Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran. I could not get into the writing style and stopped at 32%. Sigh. I have other books on my TBR list, l...
-Lisa_B3
"Tenderly cautionary, and bittersweetly encouraging." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"There is such vital, intimate depth to Nation of Strangers, 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. More than simply an account of the global currents sweeping more and more of us into a state of what some might call exile, this is a profoundly personal meditation. In this time of rampant fascism, as a previous era's definition of home grows ever more distant, Nation of Strangers is both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone." —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
"Temelkuran's biting portrayal of our society as a broken home is a call to action. Hers is a compelling case that a world where the "unhomed" are robbed of dignity is also one where nobody can truly feel settled. This book is a gift." —David Wengrow, author, with David Graeber, of The Dawn of Everything
This information about Nation of Strangers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ece Temelkuranis 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.
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