We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy to see how the castle walls were breached – first by mobile phones and wifi, then by the smart speakers and other gadgets that help and also harvest us. The idea that our homes are inviolate seems quaint nowadays. We know there are many other ways in which we are being uncastled, not least by government agents acting with impunity. And if you think that’s a problem, wait till you read the other home truths delivered by Ece Temelkuran in a book you’ll ignore at your peril.

Temelkuran is a writer of rare gifts with an urgent message. Her first books, including the award-winning Women who Blow on Knots, appeared in her native Turkish. Ten years ago, in Zagreb, she changed her language and much else in her life. Threatened in Turkey with assault or rape or imprisonment for what she has said or written, she told her mother: ‘I am not coming back home.’ That decision made her a refugee, a migrant and an asylum seeker, although she prefers to call herself ‘unhomed’. Finding sanctuary in Berlin, she began writing in English. First came How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism; then Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World; and now Nation of Strangers, the culmination of the trilogy.

The latest book takes the form of letters written between June 2022 and April last year. They are addressed to you, dear stranger – assuming that you are one of those ‘to whom our time seems too strange to become complicit in its monstrosities, all those who feel somewhat homeless in the world at this point in history’. They relate Temelkuran’s experiences in Germany, England and elsewhere. Some letters describe encounters in cafés, queues in government offices and on the streets of Berlin. These have all the grit and insight of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Others are tender and vulnerable; yet others are startling – not least one written from Davos last year, where she was invited to address tech titans and other masters of the universe.

The letter-writing structure allows Temelkuran to move around the world and around the large issues of homeland, homelessness, of what it means to belong and, inevitably, to address the question of what we are losing in this moment of migration and rising nationalism. At first you might think, as I did: ‘Oh, she’s not writing to me, these are not my experiences.’ The ones she shares about how she and those she meets survive being unhomed, and the ways they construct a new sense of home through community, shared beliefs and joint action, are easy to distance yourself from. But however different the individual circumstances, it soon becomes clear that the forces shaping Temelkuran’s life are the same ones currently tearing the world apart. Her loss of home is literal – she cannot go back to Turkey – whereas I am able to return to the UK, at least for the moment. But, as this book makes clear, most people’s lives are changing. ‘No return journey tomorrow can reach a place of yesterday. Once you leave, “back at home” is over.’

The idea that our homes are inviolate seems quaint nowadays

In a ‘dear stranger’ letter from February three years ago, Temelkuran wrote about people in the West not believing that their government could ever be hostile to its own citizens; that the people you voted into power could ‘cast you out, unhome you, even when you are in your own country’. In that context and in many others she has been a canary in the coalmine, her experience prefiguring what many in the West, not least in the US, are now encountering.

Some of these letters are messy, some difficult to read, some might seem too far out there, but all of them are relevant as we seek to navigate a way through the mess that has become part of the odyssey of our lives. In that sense, Temelkuran’s trilogy is a sort of manual, a discussion document on ways to respond to what is happening and what is to come. And what is to come? The year is young and there are many books ahead, but I will count myself lucky if I read a more important or timely book than Nation of Strangers.