Book Club: Nation of Strangers, by Ece Temelkuran

"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.

‘the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times' ― Michael Morpurgo

*This is a regular non-fiction book club focused on how individuals and communities navigate, survive, and resist unjust systems. It is hosted at Full Circle House in Brussels*

ABOUT The Author

ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and journalist. She has written for major outlets including the Guardian, New York Times and Le Monde Diplomatique, and was twice named Turkey’s most-read political columnist before losing her job to political oppression. She has lived in Lebanon, Tunisia and France, and was a visiting fellow at Oxford’s St Antony’s College. Her best-known book, How to Lose a Country (2019), examines how right-wing populism takes hold. She was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg (2021-2023), won the 2023 El Mundo International Journalism Award for press freedom, and was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for Nation of Strangers.