A genre-blending work of autofiction and memoir from the cult author of The Giro Playboy
‘Essential reading for new dads’ LIAS SAOUDI
Totally sublime. Every sentence radiates’ RICHARD MILWARD
‘A book that changes how you see the world’ ALI MILLAR
‘A rare, companionable and gorgeous book’ ROB DOYLE
In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith – author of cult classic The Giro Playboy, which captured the arty demi-monde of Shoreditch gentrifying into a hipster hellscape – 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.
‘Essential reading for new dads’ LIAS SAOUDI
Totally sublime. Every sentence radiates’ RICHARD MILWARD
‘A book that changes how you see the world’ ALI MILLAR
‘A rare, companionable and gorgeous book’ ROB DOYLE
In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith – author of cult classic The Giro Playboy, which captured the arty demi-monde of Shoreditch gentrifying into a hipster hellscape – 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.
Reviews
A superb, vivid, blazing account from the frontline of fatherhood. Strangers on the Shore is a quantum superposition of failure and happiness - a unique novelistic memoir that captures both the precarious nature of the modern world and those ever-present glimpses of paradise which never leave us
Invigorating, inspirational and even somehow ... tempting. Smith's Hastings odyssey is an absolute tonic and essential reading for new dads'
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
A tender, funny and furiously contradictory chronicle of fatherhood, love and fear. Smith's is a lively voice: street mystic and struggling bar owner, strangulated by his bohemian aspirations but grappling with the class tensions of today . . . The scorching honesty of Strangers on the Shore (as opposed to 'An Island of Strangers'!) is compelling; it reveals the remarkable psychic fracture and bitterness which post-Brexit, post-Covid Britain seems to have nurtured for a generation of parents who despite it all - like Smith - never seem to lose hope. He might find he is the pride of the England he appears to hate
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
In Strangers on the Shore, Smith creates a questing, searching book, where his mind roams over contemporary but age-old themes: of fatherhood, belonging, aging and the mysteries of the universe. It's a book that changes how you see the world, making you glad not only to have encountered it but to be alive
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
There is so much to savour in Michael Smith's 'midlife autotherapy book': its brooding thunderclouds and sudden tranquilities; its dreamer's inquisitiveness and wonder at life's mystery; its clear-eyed outrage and sadness at the decline of England, and its transcendent moments of grace in the midst of it all. Few writers have better captured the special mystique of England's southern seaside towns. Smith's attentive coastal vignettes are as various, refreshing and fine as the wines and craft ales he sips while courting the Muse. A rare, companionable and gorgeous book