In this thesis, I analyze three novels from different authors and countries. The common ground between them is that they are all non-Portuguese writers (hence, strangers) who set their fictional plots during the period of the Portuguese dictatorship. This right-wing extremism was Europe's most long-lasting dictatorship and extended to the country's overseas colonies. In this context, foreign writers are important since the view of a stranger, free from local constraints and mores, can offer distinct and relevant insights. This notion of the Stranger is not only authorial but also reveals itself in the novels' characters, which are active and reflexive agents interpreting a foreign culture while strangers to the society they come into. As such, they bring questioning and innovation into that same structure. My research uses novels as lenses for cross-cultural sociological analysis to explore society's historical, cross-cultural and memorialist tensions, as well as unsolved traumas concerning identity and (not) belonging. [...]