Strangers on the Shore

In <I>Strangers on the Shore</I>, Michael Smith - author of cult classic <I>The Giro Playboy</I>, 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.<BR/><BR/> 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.<BR/><BR/> 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, <I>Strangers on the Shore </I>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 <I>The Idler </I>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.