Strangers at the Port

  • Author Lauren Aimee Curtis
  • Narrator Danielle Carter, Jessica Douglas-Henry, Sam Peter Jackson
  • Publisher Orion
  • Run Time 4 hours and 13 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Modern and contemporary fiction.
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What to expect

A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

'Enchanting and haunting'
RACHEL RODDY

'A fable for our times'
SPECTATOR

'This novel amazed me. It is the work of a true original'
LUCIE ELVEN

'A seaside Gothic tale teeming with superstition and mistrust'
READINGS MONTHLY

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left. Her best friend, apart from her older sister Giovanna, is a donkey. Giulia and Giovanna's days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.

Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.

From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.

Critics Review

  • Curtis – who was included on Granta’s recent Best of Young British Novelists list – writes dazzlingly confident prose, too rich to be called spare yet without any superfluous weight. She writes the island as if she were Celine Sciamma shooting Portrait of a Lady on Fire

    TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  • An incredible novel about how the quiet, ritualistic lives of a pair sisters are shaken by the arrival of strangers on their island

    THE I PAPER

  • Strangers at the Port is both a fascinating delve into the small, personal stories sacrificed to the grander sweep of history and a provocative creation of a fable for our times

    THE SPECTATOR

  • Lushly poetic

    LITERARY REVIEW

  • Curtis’s writing is beautiful

    GOOD READING

  • Reading this wonderfully oblique historical tale is a little like looking at the way light refracts through a prism: its meanings and impressions disperse along its journey to reveal what the author herself has termed ‘the slippery overlap between history, fiction and memory’ . . . Fascinating

    MARIE CLAIRE, Best Books of 2023

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