Strangers — Nigel Gray

Nigel Gray has breathed new life into an almost extinct literary form, the epistolatory novel. The time is 1988/1989. Adrian is trapped in Thatcher's Britain. Harri has flown to a new life in Australia. The contrast between the old world and the new is sharply drawn. The protagonists come alive in a very contemporary way, warts, muddle, desires, anxieties, jokes, differences and all. Full of contradictions, they show at times great insight and intelligence as well as revealing an immense capacity for self-delusion. Gradually the layers of their pasts are peeled away to reveal their secrets. These letters, so full of sharp wit, stunning imagery, political perception, and insight into the human condition are love letters, entertainments, poison darts, literary jousts, and cries for help and understanding all at the same time.

Nigel Gray is an author acclaimed for his honesty and his compassion as well as for the clarity and elegance of his prose.


Highly praised by the likes of Vonnegut, Bradbury and Berger, Gray's fiction is tough and uncompromising. Strangers is an epistolary novel of intimacy and disconnection. No one writes letters as lyrically honest or self-lacerating as these, of course, but the effect is moving and provocative. Gray's short stories are equally rivetting.
Murray Waldren - The Weekend Australian

I fell in love with Nigel Gray's novel, Strangers. It is a deceptively simple form, and Gray elegantly handles the difficulties that arise. The result is a wonderful novel.

Nigel Gray is an authentic and rare writer. That is to say, what he has lived and what he has seen pursues him until he has told it; and what he has to tell, although familiar to millions, is ignored in most books. Hence his heroism. High praise indeed, praise I can only echo for both Strangers, and Skeleton in the Cupboard. There is a compassionate knowledge about life and living in these works, a wisdom of searing honesty which is eloquently literary but, at the same time, down-to-earth and approachable.
Donna Lee Brien â€" Imago

The excellence is there for all to admire. Some of the work is poised and breathtakingly moving and the depth of his experience reverberates through his writing. Nigel Gray comes across in his raw honest writing as hugely likeable with a massive capacity for love.
The West Australian

Strangers has everything. It's gutsy, varied, direct and marvellously well written â€" full of insights and quite beautiful at times. It deserves a good readership.
Peter Cushing