Strangers on the Shore

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 *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 * ROB DOYLE *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 * ALI MILLAR *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 * ALAN WARNER *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 * JOHN HIGGS *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 *

Michael Smith is a writer and filmmaker. The author of two novels and a novella published by Faber (The Giro Playboy, Unreal City, Shorty Loves Wing Wong), his work has also featured in The Guardian, Esquire, and Dazed & Confused. He has written and presented BBC4 documentaries (Citizen Smith, Drivetime) and had a regular slot on BBC2’s The Culture Show. Recently, he has focused on directing independent “video-poems” that have screened at places like the Barbican and the NFT. He also collaborated with Andrew Weatherall on a spoken word album of Unreal City. Michael is currently the only person he knows who chooses not to have a mobile phone.

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