Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger is a novel by Katherine Center, published in 2023, and its heroine is an artist who loses the ability to see the thing she paints.

Sadie Montgomery has spent years struggling to make a living from portraits, and she has just learned that she is a finalist in the competition she has been aiming at her whole career. Then a neurological condition leaves her unable to recognise faces, which she experiences as though each one has been cut into pieces and reassembled wrongly. The competition requires her to paint a portrait in a matter of weeks, and she has no idea whether her sight will return. Into that mess come two men: the charming veterinarian who treats her dog and might be the daydream fiance she has been imagining, and a neighbour in a bowling jacket who rides a Vespa and whom she cannot manage to avoid. Because she cannot judge anybody by their face, Sadie has to work out who people are from what they say and do, which turns out to change her mind about several of them.

Center writes romantic comedy with a medical premise, and the novel's serious question is how much of what people take for love is simply recognition.