The Strangers by Eugene Lim

In Eugene Lim’s beautifully bizarre new novel, multiple sets of strange twins explode or drift or otherwise come apart and yet, like entangled quanta, continue to speak impossibly to one another. Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s The Strangers, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.

What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication. 

The Strangers is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.

To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled.