Strangers in Paradise

They’re all dead. They’ve all been famous. None of them seems particularly pleased about either.

In Strangers in Paradise, some of history’s most celebrated figures meet in the afterlife to pick over unresolved business, unwanted reputations and unrealised ambitions, with only one another for company. And often, it is the last company they would have chosen.

Byron, Marx, Marie Curie, Dickens, Lucrezia Borgia, Orson Welles, Mata Hari, Trotsky and Socrates are among those who sit out eternity confronting old adversaries, unexpected companions, unreliable historians and the uncomfortable legacy of fame.

Faithfully transcribed by novelist and screenwriter Chips Hardy and vividly illuminated by the dynamic art of Oscar Grillo, these revelatory conversations offer acute reflections on celebrity, history, adversity and mortality. By turns wry, tragic, hilarious and piercingly humane, they give some of the world’s best-known names an unexpected afterlife.

Strangers in Paradise is the latest instalment in Hardy and Grillo’s lifelong collaboration, and as close to the hereafter as they can take you. For now.