This aptly titled novel might be Naomi Alderman’s strangest book yet – a work of fiction about a writer called Naomi Alderman who, after her mother’s death, discovers an odd new species in her parents’ garden. The first image ever taken of this creature is captured on a camera she set up in the garden for her father to watch the foxes. It is about the size of a badger and flat-faced, with a long trunk-like nose:

It was a mammal, going by the nipples, womb and ovaries. Its fur was thick, soft and waterproof. Its eyes were perhaps a little unusual, with a secondary inner eyelid whose purpose could not be determined. Its four feet were padded and it had three toes on each foot, each one with a long, sharp claw.

After the image is posted online, people decide to call it a ‘mimmoth’, as in a baby elephant or ‘mini mammoth’. Mimmoths soon start to proliferate in Britain and in areas where they appeared, it seems that the birth rate rises, without anyone being able to work out where they came from or why this happened.

One would be tempted to call this book autofiction, if it weren’t for the mimmoths and the fact that Alderman disavows the term, writing: ‘There was always pressure on women to turn from fiction to the appallingly named “autofiction”, with its hints of the autoerotic.’ The character of Naomi Alderman nonetheless describes working on a book that is: ‘The strangest thing I’d ever written, a cross between a novel and a memoir which gave me a kind of freedom with both forms. I had never produced anything so personal before, but the book emerged from me with a single-mindedness that frightened me.’

There is also so much insight on display here: on illness, womanhood and grief

Even though tension over where her investigations into the mimmoths will lead her escalates, I was more interested in the author than I was in these made-up creatures. The framework of speculative fiction nonetheless does seem to have allowed Alderman to, in some sense, write the memoir she is clearly ambivalent about committing to and the result is – for the most part – beguiling. She writes poignantly – or at least the character of Naomi Alderman does – about having been put on diets as a child, having multiple miscarriages and the death of her mother. Some of this is heartbreaking: ‘The loss of my mother is a clean wound already beginning to knit, but the loss of my babies goes on bleeding.’ But there is also so much insight on display here: on illness, womanhood and grief. For example: ‘Calling a woman hot is the same as calling her ugly; only very young or very naive women are deceived about this.’

Grief was also a feature of her first novel, Disobedience (2006), in which the main character and the Orthodox community she had left both mourn her father, a much-loved rabbi. In The Strangers, Alderman the fictional character explores whether the death of her mother has led her to experience a kind of psychosis that means she sees mimmoths everywhere, but she concludes: ‘So what if I had mimmoth psychosis? Or some other kind of grief-based psychological dislocation? I would live through it. We are all going to be completely alive until the very day we die.’

Alderman is a self-confessed polymath (she presented a Radio 4 series in the summer, as well as being a games writer and a novelist) and within these pages – aside from the mimmoths – she covers everything from the death of Elon Musk’s firstborn to Slimming magazine. Although the speculative aspects of the novel fizzle out somewhat, as a whole this is a strange, dazzling book.