Description
In Strangers on the Shore, 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, and 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 anew, Strangers on the Shore is deeply and unashamedly romantic, whilst also angry about the dystopian Britain we've sleepwalked into.
Endorsements
"the acid house Montaigne" — Andrew Weatherall
"Rimbaud on the dole" — The Idler