Michael Smith stays one step ahead of the property developers as he stumbles through the uncanny psychic landscape of Hastings, in an astonishing work of autofiction that explores the experience of becoming a father and the disarming grief of leaving your youth and its dreams behind.
The flâneuring Michael at the centre of the book has moved down to the 'dogshit capital of the South Coast,' started a family and opened a bar. He finds himself pouring wine in a 'drinking town with a fishing problem,' philosophising, procrastinating, morbidly obsessed with Aleister Crowley, who died in poverty in a BnB in this shabby seaside resort full of artistes and occult morris dancers.
A book about what it is like to live on the margins, sliding into a precarious middle age in turbulent times, both giving up and starting a-new, Strangers on the Shore is deeply and unashamedly romantic, whilst also angry about the dystopian Britain we've sleepwalked into. Revered by Andrew Weatherall as 'the acid house Montaigne' and The Idler as 'Rimbauld on the dole,' Michael Smith has written an endlessly moving book of transcendent beauty about fathers and songs and the pleasures of an introspective life.
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Invigorating, inspirational and even somehow ... tempting. Smith's Hastings odyssey is an absolute tonic and essential reading for new dads.' *Lias Saoudi*
'Totally sublime. Every sentence radiates. Touching, intoxicating, brilliantly lacerating and enlightened - I can't think of better company than Smith as he ladles out all the joys and pains of trying to live a 21st century bohemian dream with precarious finances on a peculiar edge of an increasingly perplexing island.' *Richard Milward*
'A poignant, philosophical and often extremely funny account of the struggles and joys of being an ageing dad trying to find his place in England's decrepit corner of the cosmos.' *Luke Turner*
'Michael Smith delivers a fantastic poetic book filled with an abundance of wonder and curiosity, generous love letters to Hastings's eccentricity, shabby chic and magick, our habit of talking to the moon and the ghosts of Crowley and old Bohemia. This book speaks to our folklore, the roots of St Leonards's past and present and all our beloved devils and dreamers. Strangers on the Shore contains the most eloquent observations of this seaside life, of home and belonging.' *Salena Godden*