In Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole gathers essays written over several years for magazines and journals, moving across literature, photography, politics, and travel with a distinctive mix of clarity and restraint.

The collection ranges widely: reflections on writers like Baldwin and Sebald sit alongside pieces on visual art, urban observation, and the uneasy moral terrain of contemporary global life.

His essays often begin with something small—a photograph, a walk through a city, a line in a novel—and gradually widen into larger meditations on memory, colonial histories, and the ethics of seeing. The voice is patient and attentive, less interested in argument than in careful observation.

What holds the book together is Cole’s particular sensibility: intellectually curious, aesthetically alert, and quietly sceptical of the stories modern culture tells about itself.