The Strangers
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
Where did you do most of your reading of this one, and did it want a blanket and a quiet house, or did it follow you onto the bus?
Before we go deeper: describe a mimmoth to someone who has not read the book. What did yours look like in your head, and did you find it cute, unsettling, or both?
The book opens with a wildlife camera in a parent's garden. What was it like to read about a small, ordinary act of watching done by someone who is grieving? Did it remind you of anything you have done to keep company with a loss?
There is something comforting about a creature that is just there, about the size of a badger, not asking permission. Which passages about the mimmoths felt soothing to you, and which ones made the back of your neck prickle?
Alderman puts her own name and her mother's death right next to an impossible animal. How did that make you feel as a reader, sitting in that space between true and invented? Did you want to know which parts were real, or was it nicer not to?
Once the creatures spread, the world starts producing theories, rumours, and people who are very certain. Where in your own life have you felt that pull, the wish for a story that explains everything, and what does the book seem to feel about that wish?
Grief and the mimmoths move through the book on parallel tracks. By the end, did the strange animal feel to you like a comfort, a companion, or a kind of grief in a different shape? What in the later chapters left you with that impression, without giving anything away?
Close your eyes for a second and find the image from this book you will still be carrying in a year. Why that one? What did it leave you feeling about your own people, your own garden, your own small unexplained things?