Strangers is a literary memoir by the Scottish novelist Emma Tennant: “a brilliant book about the extraordinary and eccentric Tennant family” (Antonia Fraser). The story begins in 1912, as the world is about to break into war. Emma’s great-aunt, Margot Asquith (wife of Britain’s Prime Minister), maintains an ongoing feud with Emma’s grandmother, the dreamy and beautiful Pamela. Pamela’s son Bim dies on the Somme, and his sacrifice is accepted “as if death lies in the faint outline of garden where it merges with rushes and reedbeds.” Gradually, we encounter Emma herself, a lonely child left at the family estate, Glen, during World War II, witnessing the mysterious comings and goings of her extended family including her aunt, the wayward, thrice-married Clare. The penultimate chapter portrays the decline of Emma’s uncle, the famous aesthete Stephen Tennant, who was written about by V. S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival. Deeply evocative and atmospheric, and written with stunning detail, Strangers is, as Publishers Weekly explains, “a provocative meditation on the ways that the past informs the present and on the simultaneous importance and unreliability of memory.”