Hamish Hamilton acquires 'deeply moving' investigation into Black masculinity

Hamish Hamilton has acquired The Stranger by Ekow Eshun, a "powerfully intimate, richly imagined" investigation into Black masculinity.

Commissioning editor Hermione Thompson bought world rights, excluding North America, from David Godwin at David Godwin Associates. The book will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in 2024.

Structured around the stories of several remarkable Black men, from the 19th to 21st century and across the global diaspora, The Stranger will set out a "radical" exploration of Black male identity and experience. From Victorian actor Ira Aldridge to philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon to infamous rapper Tupac Shakur, each chapter will find its subject "standing at a crossroads, his life and the society around him in flux".

Ultimately, Eshun will examine the forces that have shaped, constrained and transformed our understanding of Black masculinity, and consider how readers can think beyond them to a more expansive imaginative territory staked out on its own terms, says the publisher. 

Thompson said: "The Stranger joins a long-overdue conversation around Black histories and identities which is now finally entering the mainstream here in the UK – and which finds antecedent in Ekow’s previous book, Black Gold of the Sun, originally published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005. It is a thrilling piece of work in its formal and stylistic innovations, and it is also a deeply moving act of historical witness and reclamation, reaching toward something essential in the humanity of its subjects and meeting that humanity with the author’s own. It is at once sobering and life-affirming work to behold."

Eshun commented: "The Stranger is a book I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Its subject matter is very personal to me but I also see it as a journey into timely and under-explored territory. It is sometimes assumed that Black men share a common worldview based on our race and gender: Black masculinity as a fixed, objective condition. The Stranger instead proceeds from a position of unknowingness. I wanted to question the texture or sensibility of Black lives, and to ask how it feels and what it means to be Black and male without presumption of a given answer."

Eshun is the author of Black Gold of the Sun (Hamish Hamilton, 2005) and Africa State of Mind (Thames & Hudson, 2020).