Lately, I started losing my sense of belonging in this world. I have been feeling lost where I frequently wonder, look around, and think: do I even belong in this world? I mean, look at the current state of the world, who doesn’t have that kind of feeling?

Reading more books probably had something to do with it. The more pages I turned, the more I saw the world for what it truly is: a place that is far from kind, far from inclusive, and far from fair to the full spectrum of eight billion human beings living in it. The world is not as welcoming as we would like to believe. Our society is still very far from being a safe and kind place for everyone. And watching what world leaders have been doing lately has only made that feeling worse. It feels like the people in power do whatever they want, and the rest of us just have to live with it, no matter how wrong it is.

“The political truth of the world is becoming unhomed. And this tragedy is happening when new fascism is on the rise and as the planet is about to be destroyed. It is the last curtain call for the voices of the humane, and here we are, simply keeping the ball rolling.”

Ece Temelkuran, Nation of Strangers

That feeling of being out of place, of not quite fitting in anywhere, is what pushed me to pick up this book.

The title alone, Nations of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran, already spoke to me before I even read the first page. It put a name to something I had been feeling for a long time. And inside, I found the one word that sums up how I see myself in this world right now: stranger.

Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist who was pushed out for criticizing the people running it. So when she writes about displacement, she is writing from the inside. The book sits in the space of when the world is falling apart politically and environmentally in the same breath, seen through the lives of people who got swept up in both. People who were uprooted, overlooked, and left to figure it out on their own. The questions she raises are ones many of them have lived with for years: Who are you? Why did you leave? How will you survive here? When will you go home?

The whole book is written as letters to strangers, for strangers. It is about how you keep going when the world no longer feels like home. If you have ever felt like an outsider in your own life, this book will feel like it was written with you in mind.

My Favorite Bits

• “There is a sense of mourning in the air. It is thin still, but it is real. It is as if we are mourning not for what we have already lost, but for what we know we eventually will. For the first time in history, humanity is mourning in the future tense. (..) All that is beautiful has not vanished yet. We still have things. (..) But for a while now, it is as if a layer has been added to our retinas, an overlay of melancholy. Our eyes already sense it; everything that is beautiful has its future loss imprinted on them.”

• “When our basic human values don’t match up to the blunt cruelty of the new world order, we become morally homeless.”

• “When you are a stranger, you are both in and out. You are there but not really. You are nobody, yet have the endless possibilities of being anybody. Being a stranger is an antidote to the limits of being somebody.”

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Author: Ece Temelkuran
Publication date: 12 February 2026
Number of pages: 232 pages

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